Consider:
An idea can be created out of nothing except an inspired imagination.
An idea weighs nothing.
It can be transferred across the world at the speed of light for virtually zero cost.
And yet an idea, when received by a prepared mind, can have extraordinary impact.
It can reshape that mind's view of the world.
It can dramatically alter the behavior of the mind's owner.
It can cause the mind to pass on the idea to others.
Sunday, 8 March 2009
new social movement?
for a while now I have been thinking that the locally grown food initiatives that are taking place across the country and beyond are perhaps indicative of something of a shift in people's consciousness.
There are some difficulties with the developments, for example, do they cross common social and economic boundaries, does the pursuit of locally defined economy mean that people down the road are pushed out of work, does it simply represent a desperate attempt to cling on to some degree of connection to the world in an economic and social environment where commercialism rules? I think we have some serious challenges and questions to respond to when we argue for the food initiatives. My recent reading of James Lovelock's new book caused me to reflect on the issue of scale and significance of the recent research on climate warming. Whilst I recognise and take his point that perhaps it is simply too late for the vast numbers of human beings who will be caught in catastrophic rise in temperature, I feel that we need an intelligent form of response - informed yes, we can be aware of the likely futility of action geared against climate change, but it doesn't need to mean we go down without a fight.
I guess with this in mind, it is fascinating to see the diaspora of projects that are emerging - I am not interested in the 'green' ness of them, more to the point I am interested in the connectivity of them, bringing people closer in tune with their community, the land, and deepening their awareness of their world.
Here is the latest from Independent.
The city-dwellers who are becoming front garden farmers
From windswept balconies to the tiniest of backyards, a new generation of city-dwellers are growing their own vegetables wherever they can. Meg Carter digs in from the Independent newspaper:
It all started with a failed attempt to secure a plot on a local allotment. "After four years, I was still only 22nd on the waiting list," says Sebastian Mayfield, co-founder of Food Up Front. "So I began looking for an alternative closer to home. And then it dawned on me while lying in the bath one day, why don't we make better use of the space we already have?"
Mayfield's Eureka moment led him to petition a small group of locals living in the streets neighbouring his home in Balham, south London, to join him growing vegetables in front gardens or on their window sills, balconies and roofs. The idea was simple: by pooling resources and sharing expertise, participants could eat local by growing their own.
Twelve months on and Food Up Front is now signing up people for year two. It has a network of more than 30 street rep co-ordinators, and has attracted the interest of would-be urban farmers from neighbouring boroughs and beyond.
For a contribution of just £20 towards running costs, each will receive a starter pack including growing containers, locally-produced organic compost, a selection of seeds and a basic planting and harvesting guide.
"We wanted to reconnect people living in cities with food," explains Mayfield, a support worker for disabled and dyslexic children. "You don't have to own acres of countryside in Essex like Jamie Oliver to grow your own vegetables – anyone can do it using pretty much any old space."
Food Up Front co-founder Zoe Lujic, an admin worker who met Mayfield on a course on permaculture – an approach to agriculture that works with, rather than against, the natural environment – goes further. She believes front gardens can be a force for good as a defence against the worst effects of climactic extremes.
"It's about protecting the urban environment," Lujic explains. "All too often front gardens are concreted over for convenience with no thought for the important role they play. Ealing, for example, suffered flooding a few years back because so few homes had gardens which would have helped the water to drain away. Then, not long after, with limited open ground for water to be naturally stored, the hose pipe ban that followed hit hard."
Confidence rather than skill is the key for any would-be urban farmer. "The seeds we recommend people start with are simple salads – rocket, spinach – and herbs," Mayfield says. "The important thing is not to try too much too quickly. That way even the least experienced and busiest worker can get themselves up and running before graduating on to larger city-grown produce like broccoli or runner beans."
Mayfield himself did just that – from growing spinach, rocket and coriander on his balcony to tomatoes, carrots and potatoes. Lujic, meanwhile, says she successfully harvested large quantities of chillies throughout last year, despite having just one sunny window sill. In the future she hopes to encourage Food Up Front participants to find space for planting a selection of dwarf varieties of traditional English fruit.
"It's shocking how many wonderful, traditional local varieties of apples, for example, are under threat because of lack of interest from Britain's supermarkets," she observes.
The grass-roots movement Mayfield and Lujic are part of is not limited to south London. Throughout the country, a variety of local community initiatives are now being launched to encourage urban farming. Meanwhile, a range of financial support is now available to get them off the ground, including a new £50m National Lottery local food fund which opened for applications last month.
In Bristol, for example, a project called GroFun turns local gardens into growing spaces by providing expertise and volunteers. "A group of us go from garden to garden preparing beds for growing, sharing labour and tools," GroFun founder Nadia Hillman explains. "Some of the spaces we work in have been used as dumping grounds, others are forgotten urban jungles. We get owners set up and provide on-going support, including watering crops while people are on holiday."
When harvested, produce grown in this way is equally shared between all GroFun participants – garden owners and volunteers alike. A plan for the longer term, Hillman says, is setting up a local urban-grown vegetable box scheme.
Middlesbrough, meanwhile, is backing inner-city food production on a larger scale following the success of an urban farming project launched last year. The scheme is part of Designs of the Time 2007, a regional programme of sustainability-themed community projects and events.
Throughout last summer at least 1,000 people grew produce in window boxes, balconies, roundabouts and even skips. Crops were planted in June then harvested in September and cooked for a "Meal for Middlesbrough" which was eaten by 2,500 local residents. And the project looks set to go from strength to strength this year with full backing from Middlesbrough's local council and 280 growing sites across the city already confirmed.
"European funding has been secured to launch an NVQ1 level training course in urban growing," regeneration consultant Ian Collingwood explains. "Money has also been secured to set up a restaurant inspired by Jamie Oliver's Fifteen that will cook with local produce. A local food policy is being introduced with local businesses being invited to commit to using only food produced within a radius of 50 miles. And a campaign to free land locked in the middle of council estates for community growing clubs has also been approved."
Council support is one thing, but only commercial viability will secure urban farming's future, says Julie Brown, co-ordinator of north London project Growing Communities. "We grow salad leaves on our own sites because they make the best use of the small, urban spaces available in Hackney and because green salad is worth quite a lot," she explains. "The economics of urban growing are very important. Once you cultivate plots in the suburbs, it becomes viable to grow crops such as potatoes and onions on a field scale."
As well as co-ordinating and training volunteers to grow crops on three small sites in the borough, Growing Communities also runs a local farmers market and organic vegetable box scheme selling both its own produce and crops from farms on the outskirts of London. For the past two years, this has generated enough money to cover the cost of 17 part-time employees and the launch last year of an urban farm apprentice scheme. Now it is exploring ways to increase its own production and extend the model into other parts of the UK.
"Urban farming has to be seen not just as something warm and friendly but an activity that is viable within the economy to meet our ultimate aim of bringing about economic change," says Brown.
The return of the community food growers
URBAN FOOD PRODUCTION
Communities growing food together is nothing new, but the practice declined from the late Fifties onwards – in built up areas, especially – with the spread of urban development and the rise of the supermarket. Despite this, city farms, community gardens and allotments have remained popular and provide the basis on which today's grassroots urban growing schemes are being built.
CITY FARMS
The first city farm was established in London's Kentish Town in 1972. Today, city farms are well-established in many parts of the UK, offering people living in built up areas – school children, especially – invaluable access, understanding and hands-on experience of farm animals and indigenous crops. There are more than 60 city farms and a further 60 school farms in the UK.
COMMUNITY GARDENS
Like city farms, community gardens are projects created in built-up areas in response to a lack of access to green space. Most involve food-growing activities, training, school visits and some form of community business. There are now about 1,000 community gardens in Britain and a further 200 city farms and community gardens currently in development. (For more information visit: www.farmgarden.org.uk)
ALLOTMENTS
Growing interest in allotments has been fuelled in recent years by rising interest in healthy eating, organic food and exercise as well as environmental concerns (www.nsalg.org.uk)
LOCAL GROWING SCHEMES
Community-based Urban growing schemes are being set up in towns and cities across the UK. Recent additions include south London's urban food growing network Food Up Front network (www.foodupfront.org); GroFun in Bristol, which stands for GROwing Food in Urban Neighbourhoods (contact: nadiahillman@yahoo.ca). More established schemes include north London's Growing Communities (www.growingcommunities.org.uk).
There are some difficulties with the developments, for example, do they cross common social and economic boundaries, does the pursuit of locally defined economy mean that people down the road are pushed out of work, does it simply represent a desperate attempt to cling on to some degree of connection to the world in an economic and social environment where commercialism rules? I think we have some serious challenges and questions to respond to when we argue for the food initiatives. My recent reading of James Lovelock's new book caused me to reflect on the issue of scale and significance of the recent research on climate warming. Whilst I recognise and take his point that perhaps it is simply too late for the vast numbers of human beings who will be caught in catastrophic rise in temperature, I feel that we need an intelligent form of response - informed yes, we can be aware of the likely futility of action geared against climate change, but it doesn't need to mean we go down without a fight.
I guess with this in mind, it is fascinating to see the diaspora of projects that are emerging - I am not interested in the 'green' ness of them, more to the point I am interested in the connectivity of them, bringing people closer in tune with their community, the land, and deepening their awareness of their world.
Here is the latest from Independent.
The city-dwellers who are becoming front garden farmers
From windswept balconies to the tiniest of backyards, a new generation of city-dwellers are growing their own vegetables wherever they can. Meg Carter digs in from the Independent newspaper:
It all started with a failed attempt to secure a plot on a local allotment. "After four years, I was still only 22nd on the waiting list," says Sebastian Mayfield, co-founder of Food Up Front. "So I began looking for an alternative closer to home. And then it dawned on me while lying in the bath one day, why don't we make better use of the space we already have?"
Mayfield's Eureka moment led him to petition a small group of locals living in the streets neighbouring his home in Balham, south London, to join him growing vegetables in front gardens or on their window sills, balconies and roofs. The idea was simple: by pooling resources and sharing expertise, participants could eat local by growing their own.
Twelve months on and Food Up Front is now signing up people for year two. It has a network of more than 30 street rep co-ordinators, and has attracted the interest of would-be urban farmers from neighbouring boroughs and beyond.
For a contribution of just £20 towards running costs, each will receive a starter pack including growing containers, locally-produced organic compost, a selection of seeds and a basic planting and harvesting guide.
"We wanted to reconnect people living in cities with food," explains Mayfield, a support worker for disabled and dyslexic children. "You don't have to own acres of countryside in Essex like Jamie Oliver to grow your own vegetables – anyone can do it using pretty much any old space."
Food Up Front co-founder Zoe Lujic, an admin worker who met Mayfield on a course on permaculture – an approach to agriculture that works with, rather than against, the natural environment – goes further. She believes front gardens can be a force for good as a defence against the worst effects of climactic extremes.
"It's about protecting the urban environment," Lujic explains. "All too often front gardens are concreted over for convenience with no thought for the important role they play. Ealing, for example, suffered flooding a few years back because so few homes had gardens which would have helped the water to drain away. Then, not long after, with limited open ground for water to be naturally stored, the hose pipe ban that followed hit hard."
Confidence rather than skill is the key for any would-be urban farmer. "The seeds we recommend people start with are simple salads – rocket, spinach – and herbs," Mayfield says. "The important thing is not to try too much too quickly. That way even the least experienced and busiest worker can get themselves up and running before graduating on to larger city-grown produce like broccoli or runner beans."
Mayfield himself did just that – from growing spinach, rocket and coriander on his balcony to tomatoes, carrots and potatoes. Lujic, meanwhile, says she successfully harvested large quantities of chillies throughout last year, despite having just one sunny window sill. In the future she hopes to encourage Food Up Front participants to find space for planting a selection of dwarf varieties of traditional English fruit.
"It's shocking how many wonderful, traditional local varieties of apples, for example, are under threat because of lack of interest from Britain's supermarkets," she observes.
The grass-roots movement Mayfield and Lujic are part of is not limited to south London. Throughout the country, a variety of local community initiatives are now being launched to encourage urban farming. Meanwhile, a range of financial support is now available to get them off the ground, including a new £50m National Lottery local food fund which opened for applications last month.
In Bristol, for example, a project called GroFun turns local gardens into growing spaces by providing expertise and volunteers. "A group of us go from garden to garden preparing beds for growing, sharing labour and tools," GroFun founder Nadia Hillman explains. "Some of the spaces we work in have been used as dumping grounds, others are forgotten urban jungles. We get owners set up and provide on-going support, including watering crops while people are on holiday."
When harvested, produce grown in this way is equally shared between all GroFun participants – garden owners and volunteers alike. A plan for the longer term, Hillman says, is setting up a local urban-grown vegetable box scheme.
Middlesbrough, meanwhile, is backing inner-city food production on a larger scale following the success of an urban farming project launched last year. The scheme is part of Designs of the Time 2007, a regional programme of sustainability-themed community projects and events.
Throughout last summer at least 1,000 people grew produce in window boxes, balconies, roundabouts and even skips. Crops were planted in June then harvested in September and cooked for a "Meal for Middlesbrough" which was eaten by 2,500 local residents. And the project looks set to go from strength to strength this year with full backing from Middlesbrough's local council and 280 growing sites across the city already confirmed.
"European funding has been secured to launch an NVQ1 level training course in urban growing," regeneration consultant Ian Collingwood explains. "Money has also been secured to set up a restaurant inspired by Jamie Oliver's Fifteen that will cook with local produce. A local food policy is being introduced with local businesses being invited to commit to using only food produced within a radius of 50 miles. And a campaign to free land locked in the middle of council estates for community growing clubs has also been approved."
Council support is one thing, but only commercial viability will secure urban farming's future, says Julie Brown, co-ordinator of north London project Growing Communities. "We grow salad leaves on our own sites because they make the best use of the small, urban spaces available in Hackney and because green salad is worth quite a lot," she explains. "The economics of urban growing are very important. Once you cultivate plots in the suburbs, it becomes viable to grow crops such as potatoes and onions on a field scale."
As well as co-ordinating and training volunteers to grow crops on three small sites in the borough, Growing Communities also runs a local farmers market and organic vegetable box scheme selling both its own produce and crops from farms on the outskirts of London. For the past two years, this has generated enough money to cover the cost of 17 part-time employees and the launch last year of an urban farm apprentice scheme. Now it is exploring ways to increase its own production and extend the model into other parts of the UK.
"Urban farming has to be seen not just as something warm and friendly but an activity that is viable within the economy to meet our ultimate aim of bringing about economic change," says Brown.
The return of the community food growers
URBAN FOOD PRODUCTION
Communities growing food together is nothing new, but the practice declined from the late Fifties onwards – in built up areas, especially – with the spread of urban development and the rise of the supermarket. Despite this, city farms, community gardens and allotments have remained popular and provide the basis on which today's grassroots urban growing schemes are being built.
CITY FARMS
The first city farm was established in London's Kentish Town in 1972. Today, city farms are well-established in many parts of the UK, offering people living in built up areas – school children, especially – invaluable access, understanding and hands-on experience of farm animals and indigenous crops. There are more than 60 city farms and a further 60 school farms in the UK.
COMMUNITY GARDENS
Like city farms, community gardens are projects created in built-up areas in response to a lack of access to green space. Most involve food-growing activities, training, school visits and some form of community business. There are now about 1,000 community gardens in Britain and a further 200 city farms and community gardens currently in development. (For more information visit: www.farmgarden.org.uk)
ALLOTMENTS
Growing interest in allotments has been fuelled in recent years by rising interest in healthy eating, organic food and exercise as well as environmental concerns (www.nsalg.org.uk)
LOCAL GROWING SCHEMES
Community-based Urban growing schemes are being set up in towns and cities across the UK. Recent additions include south London's urban food growing network Food Up Front network (www.foodupfront.org); GroFun in Bristol, which stands for GROwing Food in Urban Neighbourhoods (contact: nadiahillman@yahoo.ca). More established schemes include north London's Growing Communities (www.growingcommunities.org.uk).
Sunday, 1 March 2009
Lovelock's new book
As Lovelock writes, 'The fundamental flaw of the green lobbies is revealed in the name Greenpeace; by conflating the humanism of peace movements with environmentalism they unconsciously anthropomorphize Gaia.' But Gaia has no concern for humans, and will not be propitiated by empty gestures such as carbon trading or limits on air traffic. What is needed, in fact, is virtually the opposite of the mix of wind turbines and organic farms, which could at best enable an overblown human population to eke a precarious living from an overtaxed Earth. If there is a sustainable future in Lovelock's view it is in a compact, high-tech civilisation with far fewer people.
Lovelock is a scientist. His criticisms of Green policies are based on rigorous scientific reasoning, and The Vanishing Face of Gaia is invaluable not only in applying Gaia theory to the current environmental crisis but also in tracing the evolution of the theory itself. Lovelock is generous to a fault in his response to defenders of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy such as Richard Dawkins, who attacked the theory because of its seeming reintroduction of purpose into biology - an objection Lovelock was able to rebut when he developed a model of a self-regulating planetary system, Daisyworld, that functions in neo-Darwinian terms. Gaia theory may yet suggest that the currently dominant version of Darwinism needs to be revised, but the theory can be formulated in terms that are consistent with the highly reductive accounts of evolution favoured by most biologists.
Lovelock mounts a challenge to the prevailing world-view as fundamental and far-reaching as any of the scientific revolutions of the past.
From the human perspective Lovelocks message regarding global change is really bleak. But James Lovelock has opened up a significant and critically important debate and it may still be supremely life-affirming, but maybe not human life. The Earth has survived worse disruptions than the one recently triggered by humans. It will go on and renew itself whatever humans do.
Read it.
James Lovelock (2009) The vanishing face of Gaia. Allan Lane / Penguin Press
Lovelock is a scientist. His criticisms of Green policies are based on rigorous scientific reasoning, and The Vanishing Face of Gaia is invaluable not only in applying Gaia theory to the current environmental crisis but also in tracing the evolution of the theory itself. Lovelock is generous to a fault in his response to defenders of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy such as Richard Dawkins, who attacked the theory because of its seeming reintroduction of purpose into biology - an objection Lovelock was able to rebut when he developed a model of a self-regulating planetary system, Daisyworld, that functions in neo-Darwinian terms. Gaia theory may yet suggest that the currently dominant version of Darwinism needs to be revised, but the theory can be formulated in terms that are consistent with the highly reductive accounts of evolution favoured by most biologists.
Lovelock mounts a challenge to the prevailing world-view as fundamental and far-reaching as any of the scientific revolutions of the past.
From the human perspective Lovelocks message regarding global change is really bleak. But James Lovelock has opened up a significant and critically important debate and it may still be supremely life-affirming, but maybe not human life. The Earth has survived worse disruptions than the one recently triggered by humans. It will go on and renew itself whatever humans do.
Read it.
James Lovelock (2009) The vanishing face of Gaia. Allan Lane / Penguin Press
intro / chap 1 / 2 / 3 enclosed
Only a few years back, when our race made its first steps into outer space, this photograph was relayed back to earth by the astronauts of Apollo 8. It is the image on our planet as ‘spaceship earth’ – a vulnerable and isolated biosphere in the vastness of the universe. It says a great deal about where we live, what we define as home, and it challenges us to think about how we live. It shows a world not delineated by boundaries and frontiers, but a world united as a whole. It shows a world of connection and interconnection, it represents unity, completeness, wholeness rather than fragmentation and disintegration. It represents something else, there is no ‘away’ where we can throw our rubbish, everywhere is ‘here’.
The world of the image tells its own story, and we can associate our own versions of a story to it. What we see, sometimes is not what we actually get.
We in the West have grown up, and live in a very privileged version of this world. But the legacy of the Western world is increasingly being drawn into question, not only from beyond its borders, but from within. If everyone on the planet were to live their lives as we do in the West, we would need five planets, not just this one. This is simply unsustainable. Alex Steffen (2008) recently commented on a tension between the unthinkable and the unimaginable dimensions of our Western way of living. Unthinkable because the challenges facing humanity are on such a scale, and in many cases of our own making, that it is easier to pursue ‘business as usual’ and hope that the problems will go away, unimaginable because the way that modernism has presented individual lifestyle to the Western citizen is such that any deviation from consumer society is perceived by the majority as a retrograde step, an inconceivable transition. The result is that it is almost unimaginable to live in a Western society where ecology drives our economy, despite this having been the basis of human existence for many millennia prior to industrialization. We live in a time that seems to have forgotten what a sustainable way of living is like. We need to connect to the tools, the models and the ideas that will achieve the change.
The story is complicated further by our continuing success as a propogating species. We are also witnessing the greatest population explosion in history. The recent United Nations report that predicted projected population growth in some parts of the world will exceed all previous estimates. Young people across the world are growing up in much more connected ways than earlier generations, with new communications technologies being more accessible and individualized one catalyzing force of this connection is an awareness of the consumer economy that fuels such innovation. Whilst these young people might not want exactly the same lifestyle as their parents, they will no doubt aspire to their own version of prosperity, and many look to the West as a vision of what that might be like.
An ecologically defined economy is currently insufficiently clear for people to make a lifestyle change and see it as a prosperous choice. We don’t know a great deal yet, about how to build a society that is environmentally sustainable, we don’t even know if we can build one that is shared across people on the planet and which promotes stability, social participation and human rights in such a way that it avoids the critical tensions of inequity that the consumer society fuels.
Towards a new paradigm
At the time of writing, many countries are working their way through a catastrophic banking crisis. What is clear about the unfolding story is that the prevailing paradigm in modern banking has been focused on equilibrium and stability, and deviance from these conditions is inconceivable. And yet the inconceivable has happened and we have had the first run on an English bank (Northern Rock) in living memory. It suggests that these conditions of certainty and stability are not necessarily conducive to the times in which we live.
It is difficult to accept uncertainty. It is easier to convince ourselves everything is alright and continue to pursue an illusion of certainty. But it is important to confront reality, we might not comprehend it, but at least we don’t fall into the trap of consensual agreement that blinds us to reality. We need to explore probabilities, and these do not arise from certainty nor from consensus, in effect we need to move to a mindset that can live with uncertainty as a constant.
One central theme informing the background noise of this book is the constant uncertainty of climate change. It seems to me that the preoccupation with the banking crisis is deflecting attention away from the seriousness of climate change and its repercussions for the human race. As our political leaders attempt to flog the carcass of the banking industry back into life, the much bigger picture is not being looked at and considered other than an economic possibility.
Drawing comparison with banking, James Lovelock (2009) says ‘perhaps sometime in the past the asset manager who cared for your pension fund showed you a growth curve for your investments that rose smoothly without a break from now until 2050, but now you would be full of doubt about so smooth and continuous a progress and would know that growth can be interrupted…Yet we are asked to believe that temperature will rise smoothly for another forty years (p5).
Climate change and banking may seem to have little in common, but they are both non-linear complex systems and changes can occur very suddenly. Both science and banking rely heavily on theory and models, experiment and observation tend to play second fiddle the expansive theoretical modeling industry.
In a similar way, we might consider educational reform as a complex, non-linear system. One thing that we know from such systems is that they are unpredictable. The increasing hegemony of the performance culture has now embedded into almost every aspect of educational practice and it is predicated upon predictability in the form of targets. Whether it serves the people well remains questionable, being educated is different from being schooled. Education is aligned closely with economy, as the Minister for children, young people and families Beverly Hughes MP said at a recent conference ‘We need to develop in young people the capacity and skills to meet the ambitions of our economy.’ The role of reform of education, and the purpose of governmental intervention is assigned to ‘support you and to give you the framework’ through which local authorities can implement the requirements of central government. Fine, if the solutions being presented attend to the real needs of the time and are not, in a similar way to banking, simply reflecting a paradigmatic failure of the immensity of the crisis that is looming in front of it. Our attention on the educational function for economy has led us to believe that education is our solution in the desire for a better future. This is, as David Orr said, not entirely the case, ‘it is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.’ (Orr 1994)
To understand the possibilities of how these issues might play out in the education sector it seems to me that we need to ask whether the reforms of yesterday, aligned with those that are now underway, provided the pathway for a transition to a much more sustainable future, or will they simply realign themselves and assume business as usual. In effect, are we witnessing another run of the Emperors New Clothes?
My observations of current reforms suggest that what is happening is yet more of what Larry Cuban described as ‘first order change’ – where there is a renewed effort to make what already exists more efficient and effective, where the basic organizational features of what we call school remain intact, and where there is little substantive alteration of the ways in which adults and young people perform their roles (Clarke and Christie 1994).
Perhaps then, by way of an alternative design, we need a new frame of reference, a new paradigm. This is a conceptual challenge, a practical challenge and a leadership challenge. The current paradigm is failing to provide a sufficiently coherent overview any more, driven as it is by an assumption that schools require a state equilibrium and stability in order to define their goals and practice successfully. I maintain that this is a false interpretation of school and a poor analysis of learning. A good deal of the day to day of learning is disconnected, multifaceted and succeeds in spite of, and not because of the impremateur of orderliness. It is time we recognized that many of the problems that we encounter with schools in developed Westernised systems are the result of the failings of the managerial paradigm, it is out of time with the world it represents. It is time to connect to a different version of our future.
The need for a revision of existing ways of looking and engaging with our institutions is not strictly limited to education. Recent events such as the financial market collapse (Soros 2008) and the increasing awareness of rapid depletion of critically required resources such as oil and global warming (Lovelock 2009), are serving to underline the need to change our behaviour across many organizations, to reconnect with the creative and to build novel solutions to persistent problems. The narrative, on both personal and collective levels, is therefore under revision, but it is not a moderate reform, it is a narrative of transformation.
As well as artists such as Ben Okri suggesting that stories drive nations, social theorists have long argued that the ‘thought world’ (Douglas 1986) we create is known to subsequently define the worlds in which we live, and these serve as dominant operational narratives. Berger and Luckmann (1966) developed the notion of constructed realities in their sociological studies describing how people live out their lives within social contexts and draw meaning through them at both personal and collective levels. A coherent life narrative enables people to create tacit assumptions on what is real, what is right and what is considered to be appropriate ways of living. These assumptions have a great influence upon daily life, they generate powerful cultural frames through which personal and institutional lives are governed. Quite simply, in Douglas’s (1986) thought worlds, the dominant organisational narrative (p.70) is so overpowering that it serves as the script for our lives. Most of us, for most of the time, barely see or name the script, it falls outside of conscious awareness and whilst it underpins the institutions in which we work and through which we might live our lives, it remains difficult to influence because the constructed reality of the institution appears to us as the objective reality - changing this is at the heart of changing a culture and changing our mind.
But it can be changed. It is quite clear that we need to find new words in order to inform and transform our thought world so that it can respond more appropriately to new challenges facing environment, community, and economy . Whilst our current lexicon is locked to another, older world view, a new lexicon provides a way to see a different reality. The very act of disturbance of existing through worlds, generates a different pattern of insight, this has an effect upon how we might live our lives as our personal and social constructions are challenged.
Chapter two: Maintenance
In his recent work, Otto Scharmer (2007) poses three poignant questions for leaders, Who are we? What are we here for? What do we want to create together? He suggests that our answers differ according to the structure of attention that we use to respond to them. If we apply a materialistic or deterministic point of view, then our answers will tend towards business as usual. But there are other ways that we might consider these questions, and by doing so, we might find our responses raise a new profile of considerations that embrace a more holistic perspective.
By placing ourselves in situations where we can reframe our present thinking, we can see new choices that are available and open to us to select. In a sense, we can revisit our stories and we can amend and rewrite the script. This is why I think these wider population, resource and climate related issues represent a leadership challenge of great magnitude. True leaders are able to step beyond the present world views and offer new insight. It is a time of choice, do we proceed with business as usual, or do we embrace a new order of things and work together to build a more sustainable world?
Maintenance as transition
'...in 2006 mankind's thirst for oil crossed the milestone rate of 86 million barrels per day, which translates into a staggering 1,000 barrels a second! Picture an olympic sized swimming pool full of oil; we would drain it in about 15 seconds. In one day we empty close to 5,500 such swimming pools.'
Peter Tertzakian (2006) A thousand barrels a second: the coming oil break point and the challenges facing an energy-dependent world. New York McGraw Hill
In his work on Transition Towns, Rob Hopkins (2008) suggests that the whole concept is underpinned by a simple premise: 'that the end of what we might call The Age of Cheap Oil (which lasted from about 1850’s until the present) is near at hand, and that for a society utterly dependent upon it, this means an enormous change' (p.18).
At the same time that Hopkins (and others) was raising the alarm on oil depletion and lack of government response the International Energy Agency made the following declaration.
‘Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future.’ Claude Mandil (2005) Executive director of the International Energy Agency - IEA.
However, somewhere between 2007 and 2008, the International Energy Agency changed its mind. Previous assessments of oil supplies were dismissed as unreliable and the Agency undertook the first ever detailed analysis of what the global oil resource looked like. Until very recently ‘it was mainly an assumption - a global assumption about the world’s oil fields.’ (Fatih Birol - IEA, author of the Energy Outlook IEA 2008). It was a country by country, field by field study, both onshore and offshore and in addition it looked at decline rates across the major 800 oil fields in the world. So we move from fiction to fact, and with the first set of data made publicly available, what are we looking at?
First, the IEA expects conventional oil extraction in the major fields to plateau in three or four years time and then it will begin to decline. In global terms there is an assumption that this can continue - working in the known fields until around 2020 when it will plateau as well.
Second, a new, revised figure has been identified for the decline rate, that is the rate at which oil is declining in the global oil fields. Last year (2007) this rate was stated at 3.7%, it has been revised to 6.7%.
This has some startling implications. It is now taken as given that oil is running out - the IEA are clear that this is the case. What is not clear is how fast we are running out. But when we add into the equation the IEA revised estimate we could be looking globally at 2020 being the likely point at which we face a crash. A point where our energy demand exceeds the available level of supply to meet the national needs. This is the reason we need to build resilient sustainable communities, without them we face considerable civil disorder.
So where are the plans? Where are the contingency strategies? If we are really looking at something that is just over a decade away then we need to begin to weave a post-oil mentality into the fabric of society - we don’t seem to be hearing the clock ticking.
Whilst this may initially seem difficult to take in, and perhaps the idea seems unreal as we busy ourselves in our daily routines, it is not necessarily the case that oil depletion represents a backward step in our lives if we take it as an opportunity to rethink how we live and 'plan sufficiently in advance and with imagination and creativity' (ibid). In Hopkins work, the challenge is clear – it is focused on resilience, or more accurately we need to rebuild resilience into our lives. This is something that we have slowly lost in our oil-dependent society, but which is abundant in many parts of the world where oil plays a smaller role in the daily life. Whilst oil has undoubtedly eased many of the toils of life that only a few generations ago (see list of oil related products below)
Figure one: Oil related products
Air conditioners, ammonia, anti-histamines, antiseptics, artificial turf, asphalt, aspirin, balloons, bandages, boats, bottles, bras, bubble gum, butane, cameras, candles, car batteries, car bodies, carpet, cassette tapes, caulking, CDs, chewing gum, cold, combs/brushes, computers, contacts, cortisone, crayons, cream, denture adhesives, deodorant, detergents, dice, dishwashing liquid, dresses, dryers, electric blankets, electrician’s tape, fertilisers, fishing lures, fishing rods, floor wax, footballs, glues, glycerin, golf balls, guitar strings, hair, hair colouring, hair curlers, hearing aids, heart valves, heating oil, house paint, ice chests, ink, insect repellent, insulation, jet fuel, life jackets, linoleum, lip balm, lipstick, loudspeakers, medicines, mops, motor oil, motorcycle helmets, movie film, nail polish, oil filters, paddles, paint brushes, paints, parachutes, paraffin, pens, perfumes, petroleum jelly, plastic chairs, plastic cups, plastic forks, plastic wrap, plastics, plywood adhesives, refrigerators, roller-skate wheels, roofing paper, rubber bands, rubber boots, rubber cement, rubbish bags, running shoes, saccharine, seals, shirts (non-cotton), shoe polish, shoes, shower curtains, solvents, spectacles, stereos, sweaters, table tennis balls, tape recorders, telephones, tennis rackets, thermos, tights, toilet seats, toners, toothpaste, transparencies, transparent tape, TV cabinets, typewriter/computer ribbons, tyres, umbrellas, upholstery, vaporisers, vitamin capsules, volleyballs, water pipes, water skis, wax, wax paper
were a regular part of daily routines, it has also been a contributor to the fragmentation of community – as people are free to travel much greater distances for work, are able to utilize labour saving devices and rely less on each other and more upon service and manufactured products from specialized industries. Seeing the re-construction of community as a by product of an oil-depleted world raises the prospect of other possibilities of transition thinking.
Clearly the transition identified in Hopkins work is considerable, but it is realisable. It is a good example of a need for a change of narrative, one that redefines the meaning of local community in order to begin to generate suitable responses to local needs. Community resilience is a critical feature of the transition movement, building upon earlier ideas and social movements of self-reliance, social action and local empowerment. It is not enough for communities to wait for others to solve this challenge, people need to act for themselves, as George Monbiot observes:
'Our hopes of a soft landing rest on just two propositions; that the oil producers figures are correct, and that governments act before they have to. I hope that reassures you.' (Monbiot, G. (2005) Crying sheep: we had better start preparing for a decline in global oil supply.' The Guardian, 27th September 2005)
So an element of resilience, and building transition comes in the form of self-reliance. This is not however, a call to resort back into an insular life. Instead, it is a move to embrace the possibilities of collaborative action. As Leadbeater (2008) recently observed ‘We are compelled to share our ideas; that is how they come to life. And when we share ideas they multiply and grow, forming a powerfully reinforcing circle. You are not defined simply by what you own. You are what you share. That should be our credo for the century to come.’(p239)
Leadbeater’s arguments in We-Think (2008) echo some of the earlier work of Ivan Illich (1973) who in his discussion of societal ‘reconstruction’ proposed a transition towards a more ‘convivial society’. Pre-empting the technological revolution of the internet, Illich foresaw a future where there would be a change in consciousness amongst people prompted through an increasing alienation from institutions that produce wealth for the few whilst dehumanizing the experience of work for many. ‘A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favour of another member’s equal freedom.’ (p12) He goes on to say that at the present time, (and I would concur that he could equally suggest at this time), ‘people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging the future to a professional elite’ (ibid). The result being that ‘institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals. What is right comes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions’ (ibid).
Resilience can therefore be seen as a form of social action, it draws down to local people acting locally to determine agendas for change that have local meaning and purpose. This implies that there is a means of achieving such ambition, and resilience therefore has systemic implications, connecting the local with national and international matters. It emerges as a centrally important theme in the context of our response in creating sustainable communities.
So what exactly is resilience?
Resilience refers to:
The ability of a system, from individual people to entire economies to hold together and maintain their ability to function in the face of change and shock from external sources. (Source: Wiki 2009)
I think that there is a very important characteristic implicit in this definition - that of adaptability. Whilst it might appear that there is really very little that we might do on a personal level to influence the actions of major multinational corporations in their ongoing quest for oil, or across institutions in their attention to targets and goals we can, I think, begin to explore quite legitimately and with integrity, the ingredients of resilience that will enable us to survive in a time of sustainable retreat. To begin this work, we can look at current understanding of resilient systems, we can look to the natural world, and in particular the science of ecosystems.
Simon Levin identifies three features that make ecosystems resilient and adaptive: Diversity, Modularity and Tight Feedback.
Let us take a look at each of these.
Diversity: concerns the number of elements that compose a system - this may be people, species, different businesses or schools. Resilience arising from diversity is related not only to number of participants or members of a system- so the more diverse the system the more resilient, but also from the number of different types of connections that exist between the different participants or members. A good way of thinking about this is to imagine a wheat field, a monoculture such as a wheat field is not a diverse system, whereas the forest is a diverse system because it is biodiverse.
A second type of diversity is found in the difference between systems. Difference between systems in natural systems is a strength, not a weakness. It is Fordism (Kelly in press) that has pushed human thinking towards a deeply held belief in the singularity of approach to all aspects of human endeavour ranging from mass production of commodities through to policy approaches to activity as diverse as farming (where the legal requirements for animal management are the same regardless of herd size) to healthcare and education. However, design and practice may be more efficient in replicable modeling, but they are not necessarily more resilient as a repeat pattern in one context becomes the default pattern across many contexts. The recent collapse in the banking system shows how a commonly held belief in a particular way of operating can have catastrophic results (Soros 2008), and perhaps more pointedly, any challenges to the modus operandi is not tolerated .
We are learning that replication based modeling, which is the idea of exact solutions being taken from one place and dropped into another is not a way to build local resilience. Instead we would anticipate a more resilient approach to the use of successfully identified practices being to locate them into new systems and adapting them according to local configuration and need - each community for example, will nurture and generate its own solutions even when it connects with systems elsewhere. Overall, diversity demonstrates resilience through lots of niche responses and subtle changes to locally defined needs, in effect the political message is that local matters.
Derren Brown, the famous illusionist recently ran a programme on television where he offered a fool-proof service to horse racing punters. The basis of the programme was that he traded on his amazing ability of prediction. He invited people to come forward and place a fixed bet on the winner of a specific horse race. One thousand people responded by putting money on a horse, but here was the rub, Brown spread bet, he covered every horse in the race and thus guaranteed that some of his clientele were going to win. Taking only his winners, who were still committed to the notion that he was able to pick out winners, he repeated the process again and again, slowly thinning down the number of people each time whose horse won the race and always inviting the winning punters to continue to put increasingly large amounts of money on the horses. So punters who stuck with Brown’s winning bets began to win large amounts of money, and being on the inside track so to speak, meant that they were very likely to win again as the suggested bets were from a trusted source, and there was no cause to believe he would fail. Of course, eventually there was only one punter left, who was persuaded to put all her life savings on a horse of Browns choosing. It lost. However, television being what it was, Brown had it covered and she didn’t really lose because he had put the money on a different horse. Thus maintaining the magic, but not after revealing the scam to the trusting woman, and to the audience.
I tell this story because it emphasizes the importance of difference between systems which we have seemingly lost in our pursuit of educational reform. Despite more than two decades of endless change, we still seem no closer to making any real sense out of public sector developments. Public spending on education has gone up and down, according to the colour of the political flag that was in office, but in the main, the plethora of initiatives that successive governments have committed to as drivers of improvement in services have singularly failed to make the grade. We are now in a situation where we need to try a new direction as money is once again short, and there is a growing recognition that we need to redesign service in a way that high standards are established without resorting to spending more than economically we can afford to spend. For some this new agenda is seen as a paradigm change. For most however, I think in reality it will be a variation on the existing theme. Our reform, is simply that, reengineering the existing form, not transforming. Whatever happens, it is very likely that educational service reform will continue to undertake an equivalent of Browns spread betting, sifting only the successful initiatives as evidence of how to improve the system, and leaving on the sideline a growing number of ‘also ran’ schools.
We can see this in the logic underpinning much of the school to school networking taking place. The emphasis on knowledge transfer, replicating across the system any examples in the system of great success, making sure that the champions of these successes are highly visible and ready to make clear for all that will listen what exactly constituted their success (see for example the DCSF Teachers as researchers programme 2007-2009). The findings will then form the basis of the next development in areas that lack the cutting edge knowledge. We are already seeing this in the work of the schools challenge initiative (DCSF 2008). Knowing ‘what works’, is persuasive, it comes with the full backing of government seeking solutions in areas under pressure of greatest need, and as an approach it is endorsed by most of the professional development community who need to be seen to have a body of knowledge and be seen to know how to use it properly.
In this world, certainty plays a very significant part in ensuring that we have an equitable, open opportunity for all. Indeed, this has formed the basis of many recent school improvement initiatives, and certainly underpins much of the concept of what is known as ‘evidence led practice.’ The usual systems of carrot and stick apply, performance will be defined and measured against the implementation and management of the new developments in their new settings. We can presume, as knowledge transfer mechanisms begin to embed, that a few organisations improve, many will drift, some will fail.
It seems clear to me that in our next phase, we need to examine the idea of transformation and challenge the tyranny of certainty vehemently. What we do know about knowledge is that ‘whenever knowledge connects with knowledge, new connections take place. Ideas spawn ideas, which synthesis with each other until more knowledge results. It is completely natural.’ (Verna Allee 1993). We simply don’t know a great deal about how to transform a system in the form of a service that has been around for over a century because until now all we have ever done is reform it. Embracing the reality of ‘not knowing’ is much harder for us to take on board and embed into our organisational psyche. In the previous two phases of public sector reform, under both conservative and labour administrations, professional knowledge was managed in unprecedented ways by reinforcing the assumption that someone out there knew best, and in that certainty, we simply had to find out what it was, where it was, how it worked and how to repeat it somewhere else to make improvements. This may now be proving to be a short sighted approach.
Embracing lack of knowledge places a profession of educators in a very interesting position. It means we have to learn. We have to learn to see the problems differently. It means we have to learn to live with chaotic, diverse and emergent public service rather than assuming a fixed, orthodox approach that will suit all-comers. We need to learn how to create the conditions that are conducive for innovative, creative ideas that can be explored, deepened and connected over time not through procedure and content, but through a philosophy of emergence - a willingness, collectively to listen, study, trial, reflect, reconstruct and communicate with integrity and in a culture of trust. We need to learn to create a learning community, designed around relationships that are focused on emergence (Senge et al 2006).
A third dimension of building resilience comes in what Levin calls modularity. This is concerned with how connections are made. In particular this is concerned with networks and the sharing of information and know how. A resilient system is one that self-organises in the event of a shock. In Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen's work (Harnessing Complexity (2000) New York. Basic Books) they cite the example of apprenticeships as a good way of thinking about how ideas are passed, developed but do not remain dependent upon any one source. There are many other examples, but the main point is that social networks such as communities can generate resilience through their attention to the different forms of cultural, social and intellectual capital available across a dispersed community of people, it re-emphasises the importance of an acceptance of diversity as a prerequisite of robust resilient community.
Tight feedback: Where the consequences of action is quickly recognised there is less likelihood of inappropriate and continuous adoption of poor solutions. Tight feedback brings home the effect of what we do in any given situation. The selected level of feedback will relate to the types of connections we make with others, and the number of connections we establish - thus the three themes feeding into resilience are themselves interdependent, without each other the system breaks down and is weaker than with them all acting as a coherent whole.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued that we are coming to a tipping point in our society where our reserves of a critically important resource – oil, will in less than a generation, move into decline. This raises a series of challenges for our species, at international, national and local levels. In the transition from an oil dependent to a post-oil economy, we will need to find new ways of using the resources we have available, and we will need to establish new structures and systems to suit the changes that will arise from this transition. Using Hopkins (2008) recent terminology, we can usefully think about this challenge as one where we build resilience into our communities. This is an integrated, systems based approach to change which combines personal and collective action at a local level, but pays close attention to systemic implications and possibilities that emerge from strategic intervention.
The next chapter will …
Chapter three: Design
Nearly a decade ago I made a first attempt at a conceptual framework to focus attention on the ways schools might enhance their operational performance in response to the challenge of sustainable community (Clarke 2000). The framework was a taxonomy of reform, designed on an axis of development from a modernist to an ecological paradigm. It represented a dissatisfaction with the school effectiveness and improvement field and an attempt, a flawed attempt as it turned out, to design a way forward through the concept of a learning community. I argued for a shift from the mechanical interpretation of the process of education, to a living systems interpretation of the process of education that was grounded in lived experience that drew more from the ecological than the managed world view. The framework, which tried to provide arguments for ‘learning communities’ of school, subsequently made me draw into question the appropriacy of managerialism as an organising device that would enhance educational improvement, founded as it is within a contrasting world view from that of living systems, where order, predictability, and accountability form the basis of operational practice across both the management and development of the educational journey.
Figure one: A taxonomy of transformation – from a managed to an emergent paradigm (adapted from Clarke 2000)
Mindset of managed change Mindset of change as emergent phenomena
First order dominated – making what already exists more effective and efficient Second order dominated – confronting organizational issues and challenging the orthodoxy
Delivery focused Reflective and process focused
Visionary Innovative, seeking novelty
Change as simplification of self Change as complexification of self
Isolated and individually accountable Collaborative and collectively responsible
It is through the attempts to create learning communities I have come to realise quite how the organisational thinking frame - the narrative of the thought world, dominates organisational improvement. It permeates every aspect of our institutional activity, and yet it remains unsettling as the vehicle of choice for many school leaders who are required to introduce change. I think that this restlessness amongst school leaders is at this stage intuitive, rather than rational (Atkinson and Claxton 2000, Clarke 2002). There is a feeling, that somewhere in the drive for higher performance there is a disconnect between beliefs, values and assumptions of how we might wish to live, and how we are actually living, what Fallon and Barnett (2009) describe as Pseudo Community.
This disconnect is creating turbulence and school leaders are beginning to look outside of the existing school improvement frame. They have become frustrated because they attempt to influence and inform the change process, by attending to the surface structures. Leaders do not, and indeed cannot, base their practical day-to-day decision making on knowledge alone as they pursue change, because that knowledge deals primarily with the surface change of their learning community. To influence what Peter Senge and his colleagues (2004) call ‘deep structure’ we need to tackle the beliefs, values and assumptions people hold and draw upon as they manage their lives. These beliefs, values and assumptions provide the bedrock upon which the ‘surface structure’ (ibid) of rules, procedures and processes become real. The combination of the deep structures and surface structures go a long way to define the activity of a society, an organisation, a community, a classroom, a family. In our case, having a well conceived theoretical framework of how to operationalise a learning community in itself might help us to interpret the reality of the school in a new way, but it hardly serves as a way of scoping human activity to lead towards operationalising a new paradigm, because we still mediate the meaning of learning community through the prevailing dominant narrative.
Paqette and Fallon (in press) discuss these ‘framing’ issues in detail in their recent work. Defining four paradigmatic frames they explore the nature of the learning community that will most likely emerge (see figure), given the thought world in which it functions. Earlier research (Bertrand and Valois 1980) indicated that few schools and school systems operate within the assumptions and values of only one type of paradigm. Nevertheless, they found that teachers and administrators in most learning communities orientate in favour of a single socio-cultural paradigm and a single educational paradigm and that the latter flows from the former.
Figure: Paradigmatic theory frames (adapted from Paquette and Fallon in press)
Managerial paradigm Existentialism paradigm Dialectic paradigm Living systems paradigm
Socio-cultural frame Positivist and economic efficiency assumptions about knowledge and the nature of society A person centered way of understanding self and society Communist and socialist assumptions about knowledge and the nature of society The sustainability of life systems and non-hierarchical complementarity of individuals and communities as ways of being and relating in a society
Educational paradigm frame Characterized by a view of education as an efficient transmission of predetermined knowledge designed to promote rational learning and knowing and maintain a socio-economic order Characterized by a view of education based on empowerment of a creative, confident, and free individual who shapes his/her learning process Characterized by a view of education as a dialectical form of knowing to promote the common good through a process of collectivism and mutual assistance leading to a classless society Characterized by a view of education based on a mode of knowing in which learners develop their capacity to create new alternatives by producing knowledge that promotes a vision of society based on non-hierarchical and democratic decision making and a complementarity of differences
Fallon and Barnett (2009) ask important questions of the fundamental and subsequent direction that learning communities might take. They expose the thought worlds in such a way as it is possible to ask the question: Which one(s) would be most appropriate and (why?) to frame our understanding of the nature and purposes of a learning community constructed in response to a changing environment?
The clear message from this research is that as schools grapple with the wish to create a learning community, they may be locked into a paradigmatic frame that impedes their chance of moving forward, which is accountable to a wider systemic approach that holds to a different set of guiding rules and principles, beliefs and values than those that they may be forming on the ground in response to new understanding of their context. This puts teachers and headteachers, students and parents on a constant collision course where ambition is often impeded by organisation. The different world views can interfere with each other, but they are working from different paradigmatic frames – they are different epistemologies. As a result, the dominant thought world prevails, and school communities find that they are not making the change to a learning community because the dominant thought world impedes the transition.
I discovered that the learning community ideas generated better understanding and provided the context for initially reinforcing but ultimately self-defeating processes of change. Indeed I now think that I deluded myself into thinking that the ideas espoused in our early formulations of learning communities were in any way a radical break from the past. I was attempting to shape and redefine a discourse of change from within an established, dominant world view. Little surprise then, that frustration has triumphed over euphoria.
Despite the failings and frustrations, I have remained closely aligned to the central tenet of the theoretical framework. That is, that we need to make a profound shift in our ‘thought world’ and take it from the mechanical to the living system. In so doing we embed deep into the functionality of any newly posited design, the fundamental truth that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature, we are living beings pursuing our lives within a living system.
Recently, and almost continually during the last two years, I have begun to find ways in which this simple issue, can be achieved and I have watched and participated in a movement that is fast gaining recognition and influence in my local community . Whilst I am now far more realistic and conscious of my own role within this loose affiliation of people and projects, I feel it is time to say something more. At its simplest, I think we can safely say that the existing paradigm is best defined as a deficit model of education, where schools, students and professionals all adhere to a thought world where success is defined by knowing, and that the ‘knowing’ is something that is more often than not defined by someone else, somewhere else. In Michael Fielding’s work this is an issue of democratic representation (Fielding 1997), in Terry Wrigley’s view it is one of class access (Wrigley 2005). From whatever critical position we adopt, it is clear. The resulting ‘catch up’ of those charged with providing the educational service within this knowledge framework is perpetual; no matter how well intentioned and well designed those pursuing learning organisational design from within the existing paradigm will never resolve the problem of ownership and power, because the ownership of the knowledge is beyond the self or the resources of the organisation of the school. This I think serves to compound small successes, and doubly disempowers those who are struggling to deal with existing demands. Second, the entire system that serves to manage and improve education is premised on the first assertion. So we have inspections, national curricula, state mandates, off-the-shelf solutions which schools become ever more obliged to use in order to at least show some semblance of effort to keep in line with the direction of the flow. It is initially reinforcing, people see success, they are reported as improving, they receive adulation, they then buy into the idea that it is the only game in town, and once they do this the likelihood of introducing any alternative design is impeded, significantly.
What we see in educational reform is a repeating pattern, as Seymour Sarason (1990) reported ‘a predictable failure’ lies deep in the managed system, a prevailing misconception about the meaning of educational, and societal change. I maintain that this is no longer sustainable, there are too many externally pressing challenges for business as usual to prevail. It presents us with some significant questions. One being whether we really need schools in their current form any more if their capacity to make the leap to a new paradigm is a practical impossibility? A second being the ways that we might think about how to act, given the need to touch both deep and surface structure. A third being the need to provide some examples of this happening.
The world of the image tells its own story, and we can associate our own versions of a story to it. What we see, sometimes is not what we actually get.
We in the West have grown up, and live in a very privileged version of this world. But the legacy of the Western world is increasingly being drawn into question, not only from beyond its borders, but from within. If everyone on the planet were to live their lives as we do in the West, we would need five planets, not just this one. This is simply unsustainable. Alex Steffen (2008) recently commented on a tension between the unthinkable and the unimaginable dimensions of our Western way of living. Unthinkable because the challenges facing humanity are on such a scale, and in many cases of our own making, that it is easier to pursue ‘business as usual’ and hope that the problems will go away, unimaginable because the way that modernism has presented individual lifestyle to the Western citizen is such that any deviation from consumer society is perceived by the majority as a retrograde step, an inconceivable transition. The result is that it is almost unimaginable to live in a Western society where ecology drives our economy, despite this having been the basis of human existence for many millennia prior to industrialization. We live in a time that seems to have forgotten what a sustainable way of living is like. We need to connect to the tools, the models and the ideas that will achieve the change.
The story is complicated further by our continuing success as a propogating species. We are also witnessing the greatest population explosion in history. The recent United Nations report that predicted projected population growth in some parts of the world will exceed all previous estimates. Young people across the world are growing up in much more connected ways than earlier generations, with new communications technologies being more accessible and individualized one catalyzing force of this connection is an awareness of the consumer economy that fuels such innovation. Whilst these young people might not want exactly the same lifestyle as their parents, they will no doubt aspire to their own version of prosperity, and many look to the West as a vision of what that might be like.
An ecologically defined economy is currently insufficiently clear for people to make a lifestyle change and see it as a prosperous choice. We don’t know a great deal yet, about how to build a society that is environmentally sustainable, we don’t even know if we can build one that is shared across people on the planet and which promotes stability, social participation and human rights in such a way that it avoids the critical tensions of inequity that the consumer society fuels.
Towards a new paradigm
At the time of writing, many countries are working their way through a catastrophic banking crisis. What is clear about the unfolding story is that the prevailing paradigm in modern banking has been focused on equilibrium and stability, and deviance from these conditions is inconceivable. And yet the inconceivable has happened and we have had the first run on an English bank (Northern Rock) in living memory. It suggests that these conditions of certainty and stability are not necessarily conducive to the times in which we live.
It is difficult to accept uncertainty. It is easier to convince ourselves everything is alright and continue to pursue an illusion of certainty. But it is important to confront reality, we might not comprehend it, but at least we don’t fall into the trap of consensual agreement that blinds us to reality. We need to explore probabilities, and these do not arise from certainty nor from consensus, in effect we need to move to a mindset that can live with uncertainty as a constant.
One central theme informing the background noise of this book is the constant uncertainty of climate change. It seems to me that the preoccupation with the banking crisis is deflecting attention away from the seriousness of climate change and its repercussions for the human race. As our political leaders attempt to flog the carcass of the banking industry back into life, the much bigger picture is not being looked at and considered other than an economic possibility.
Drawing comparison with banking, James Lovelock (2009) says ‘perhaps sometime in the past the asset manager who cared for your pension fund showed you a growth curve for your investments that rose smoothly without a break from now until 2050, but now you would be full of doubt about so smooth and continuous a progress and would know that growth can be interrupted…Yet we are asked to believe that temperature will rise smoothly for another forty years (p5).
Climate change and banking may seem to have little in common, but they are both non-linear complex systems and changes can occur very suddenly. Both science and banking rely heavily on theory and models, experiment and observation tend to play second fiddle the expansive theoretical modeling industry.
In a similar way, we might consider educational reform as a complex, non-linear system. One thing that we know from such systems is that they are unpredictable. The increasing hegemony of the performance culture has now embedded into almost every aspect of educational practice and it is predicated upon predictability in the form of targets. Whether it serves the people well remains questionable, being educated is different from being schooled. Education is aligned closely with economy, as the Minister for children, young people and families Beverly Hughes MP said at a recent conference ‘We need to develop in young people the capacity and skills to meet the ambitions of our economy.’ The role of reform of education, and the purpose of governmental intervention is assigned to ‘support you and to give you the framework’ through which local authorities can implement the requirements of central government. Fine, if the solutions being presented attend to the real needs of the time and are not, in a similar way to banking, simply reflecting a paradigmatic failure of the immensity of the crisis that is looming in front of it. Our attention on the educational function for economy has led us to believe that education is our solution in the desire for a better future. This is, as David Orr said, not entirely the case, ‘it is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.’ (Orr 1994)
To understand the possibilities of how these issues might play out in the education sector it seems to me that we need to ask whether the reforms of yesterday, aligned with those that are now underway, provided the pathway for a transition to a much more sustainable future, or will they simply realign themselves and assume business as usual. In effect, are we witnessing another run of the Emperors New Clothes?
My observations of current reforms suggest that what is happening is yet more of what Larry Cuban described as ‘first order change’ – where there is a renewed effort to make what already exists more efficient and effective, where the basic organizational features of what we call school remain intact, and where there is little substantive alteration of the ways in which adults and young people perform their roles (Clarke and Christie 1994).
Perhaps then, by way of an alternative design, we need a new frame of reference, a new paradigm. This is a conceptual challenge, a practical challenge and a leadership challenge. The current paradigm is failing to provide a sufficiently coherent overview any more, driven as it is by an assumption that schools require a state equilibrium and stability in order to define their goals and practice successfully. I maintain that this is a false interpretation of school and a poor analysis of learning. A good deal of the day to day of learning is disconnected, multifaceted and succeeds in spite of, and not because of the impremateur of orderliness. It is time we recognized that many of the problems that we encounter with schools in developed Westernised systems are the result of the failings of the managerial paradigm, it is out of time with the world it represents. It is time to connect to a different version of our future.
The need for a revision of existing ways of looking and engaging with our institutions is not strictly limited to education. Recent events such as the financial market collapse (Soros 2008) and the increasing awareness of rapid depletion of critically required resources such as oil and global warming (Lovelock 2009), are serving to underline the need to change our behaviour across many organizations, to reconnect with the creative and to build novel solutions to persistent problems. The narrative, on both personal and collective levels, is therefore under revision, but it is not a moderate reform, it is a narrative of transformation.
As well as artists such as Ben Okri suggesting that stories drive nations, social theorists have long argued that the ‘thought world’ (Douglas 1986) we create is known to subsequently define the worlds in which we live, and these serve as dominant operational narratives. Berger and Luckmann (1966) developed the notion of constructed realities in their sociological studies describing how people live out their lives within social contexts and draw meaning through them at both personal and collective levels. A coherent life narrative enables people to create tacit assumptions on what is real, what is right and what is considered to be appropriate ways of living. These assumptions have a great influence upon daily life, they generate powerful cultural frames through which personal and institutional lives are governed. Quite simply, in Douglas’s (1986) thought worlds, the dominant organisational narrative (p.70) is so overpowering that it serves as the script for our lives. Most of us, for most of the time, barely see or name the script, it falls outside of conscious awareness and whilst it underpins the institutions in which we work and through which we might live our lives, it remains difficult to influence because the constructed reality of the institution appears to us as the objective reality - changing this is at the heart of changing a culture and changing our mind.
But it can be changed. It is quite clear that we need to find new words in order to inform and transform our thought world so that it can respond more appropriately to new challenges facing environment, community, and economy . Whilst our current lexicon is locked to another, older world view, a new lexicon provides a way to see a different reality. The very act of disturbance of existing through worlds, generates a different pattern of insight, this has an effect upon how we might live our lives as our personal and social constructions are challenged.
Chapter two: Maintenance
In his recent work, Otto Scharmer (2007) poses three poignant questions for leaders, Who are we? What are we here for? What do we want to create together? He suggests that our answers differ according to the structure of attention that we use to respond to them. If we apply a materialistic or deterministic point of view, then our answers will tend towards business as usual. But there are other ways that we might consider these questions, and by doing so, we might find our responses raise a new profile of considerations that embrace a more holistic perspective.
By placing ourselves in situations where we can reframe our present thinking, we can see new choices that are available and open to us to select. In a sense, we can revisit our stories and we can amend and rewrite the script. This is why I think these wider population, resource and climate related issues represent a leadership challenge of great magnitude. True leaders are able to step beyond the present world views and offer new insight. It is a time of choice, do we proceed with business as usual, or do we embrace a new order of things and work together to build a more sustainable world?
Maintenance as transition
'...in 2006 mankind's thirst for oil crossed the milestone rate of 86 million barrels per day, which translates into a staggering 1,000 barrels a second! Picture an olympic sized swimming pool full of oil; we would drain it in about 15 seconds. In one day we empty close to 5,500 such swimming pools.'
Peter Tertzakian (2006) A thousand barrels a second: the coming oil break point and the challenges facing an energy-dependent world. New York McGraw Hill
In his work on Transition Towns, Rob Hopkins (2008) suggests that the whole concept is underpinned by a simple premise: 'that the end of what we might call The Age of Cheap Oil (which lasted from about 1850’s until the present) is near at hand, and that for a society utterly dependent upon it, this means an enormous change' (p.18).
At the same time that Hopkins (and others) was raising the alarm on oil depletion and lack of government response the International Energy Agency made the following declaration.
‘Hydrocarbon resources around the world are abundant and will easily fuel the world through its transition to a sustainable energy future.’ Claude Mandil (2005) Executive director of the International Energy Agency - IEA.
However, somewhere between 2007 and 2008, the International Energy Agency changed its mind. Previous assessments of oil supplies were dismissed as unreliable and the Agency undertook the first ever detailed analysis of what the global oil resource looked like. Until very recently ‘it was mainly an assumption - a global assumption about the world’s oil fields.’ (Fatih Birol - IEA, author of the Energy Outlook IEA 2008). It was a country by country, field by field study, both onshore and offshore and in addition it looked at decline rates across the major 800 oil fields in the world. So we move from fiction to fact, and with the first set of data made publicly available, what are we looking at?
First, the IEA expects conventional oil extraction in the major fields to plateau in three or four years time and then it will begin to decline. In global terms there is an assumption that this can continue - working in the known fields until around 2020 when it will plateau as well.
Second, a new, revised figure has been identified for the decline rate, that is the rate at which oil is declining in the global oil fields. Last year (2007) this rate was stated at 3.7%, it has been revised to 6.7%.
This has some startling implications. It is now taken as given that oil is running out - the IEA are clear that this is the case. What is not clear is how fast we are running out. But when we add into the equation the IEA revised estimate we could be looking globally at 2020 being the likely point at which we face a crash. A point where our energy demand exceeds the available level of supply to meet the national needs. This is the reason we need to build resilient sustainable communities, without them we face considerable civil disorder.
So where are the plans? Where are the contingency strategies? If we are really looking at something that is just over a decade away then we need to begin to weave a post-oil mentality into the fabric of society - we don’t seem to be hearing the clock ticking.
Whilst this may initially seem difficult to take in, and perhaps the idea seems unreal as we busy ourselves in our daily routines, it is not necessarily the case that oil depletion represents a backward step in our lives if we take it as an opportunity to rethink how we live and 'plan sufficiently in advance and with imagination and creativity' (ibid). In Hopkins work, the challenge is clear – it is focused on resilience, or more accurately we need to rebuild resilience into our lives. This is something that we have slowly lost in our oil-dependent society, but which is abundant in many parts of the world where oil plays a smaller role in the daily life. Whilst oil has undoubtedly eased many of the toils of life that only a few generations ago (see list of oil related products below)
Figure one: Oil related products
Air conditioners, ammonia, anti-histamines, antiseptics, artificial turf, asphalt, aspirin, balloons, bandages, boats, bottles, bras, bubble gum, butane, cameras, candles, car batteries, car bodies, carpet, cassette tapes, caulking, CDs, chewing gum, cold, combs/brushes, computers, contacts, cortisone, crayons, cream, denture adhesives, deodorant, detergents, dice, dishwashing liquid, dresses, dryers, electric blankets, electrician’s tape, fertilisers, fishing lures, fishing rods, floor wax, footballs, glues, glycerin, golf balls, guitar strings, hair, hair colouring, hair curlers, hearing aids, heart valves, heating oil, house paint, ice chests, ink, insect repellent, insulation, jet fuel, life jackets, linoleum, lip balm, lipstick, loudspeakers, medicines, mops, motor oil, motorcycle helmets, movie film, nail polish, oil filters, paddles, paint brushes, paints, parachutes, paraffin, pens, perfumes, petroleum jelly, plastic chairs, plastic cups, plastic forks, plastic wrap, plastics, plywood adhesives, refrigerators, roller-skate wheels, roofing paper, rubber bands, rubber boots, rubber cement, rubbish bags, running shoes, saccharine, seals, shirts (non-cotton), shoe polish, shoes, shower curtains, solvents, spectacles, stereos, sweaters, table tennis balls, tape recorders, telephones, tennis rackets, thermos, tights, toilet seats, toners, toothpaste, transparencies, transparent tape, TV cabinets, typewriter/computer ribbons, tyres, umbrellas, upholstery, vaporisers, vitamin capsules, volleyballs, water pipes, water skis, wax, wax paper
were a regular part of daily routines, it has also been a contributor to the fragmentation of community – as people are free to travel much greater distances for work, are able to utilize labour saving devices and rely less on each other and more upon service and manufactured products from specialized industries. Seeing the re-construction of community as a by product of an oil-depleted world raises the prospect of other possibilities of transition thinking.
Clearly the transition identified in Hopkins work is considerable, but it is realisable. It is a good example of a need for a change of narrative, one that redefines the meaning of local community in order to begin to generate suitable responses to local needs. Community resilience is a critical feature of the transition movement, building upon earlier ideas and social movements of self-reliance, social action and local empowerment. It is not enough for communities to wait for others to solve this challenge, people need to act for themselves, as George Monbiot observes:
'Our hopes of a soft landing rest on just two propositions; that the oil producers figures are correct, and that governments act before they have to. I hope that reassures you.' (Monbiot, G. (2005) Crying sheep: we had better start preparing for a decline in global oil supply.' The Guardian, 27th September 2005)
So an element of resilience, and building transition comes in the form of self-reliance. This is not however, a call to resort back into an insular life. Instead, it is a move to embrace the possibilities of collaborative action. As Leadbeater (2008) recently observed ‘We are compelled to share our ideas; that is how they come to life. And when we share ideas they multiply and grow, forming a powerfully reinforcing circle. You are not defined simply by what you own. You are what you share. That should be our credo for the century to come.’(p239)
Leadbeater’s arguments in We-Think (2008) echo some of the earlier work of Ivan Illich (1973) who in his discussion of societal ‘reconstruction’ proposed a transition towards a more ‘convivial society’. Pre-empting the technological revolution of the internet, Illich foresaw a future where there would be a change in consciousness amongst people prompted through an increasing alienation from institutions that produce wealth for the few whilst dehumanizing the experience of work for many. ‘A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favour of another member’s equal freedom.’ (p12) He goes on to say that at the present time, (and I would concur that he could equally suggest at this time), ‘people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging the future to a professional elite’ (ibid). The result being that ‘institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals. What is right comes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions’ (ibid).
Resilience can therefore be seen as a form of social action, it draws down to local people acting locally to determine agendas for change that have local meaning and purpose. This implies that there is a means of achieving such ambition, and resilience therefore has systemic implications, connecting the local with national and international matters. It emerges as a centrally important theme in the context of our response in creating sustainable communities.
So what exactly is resilience?
Resilience refers to:
The ability of a system, from individual people to entire economies to hold together and maintain their ability to function in the face of change and shock from external sources. (Source: Wiki 2009)
I think that there is a very important characteristic implicit in this definition - that of adaptability. Whilst it might appear that there is really very little that we might do on a personal level to influence the actions of major multinational corporations in their ongoing quest for oil, or across institutions in their attention to targets and goals we can, I think, begin to explore quite legitimately and with integrity, the ingredients of resilience that will enable us to survive in a time of sustainable retreat. To begin this work, we can look at current understanding of resilient systems, we can look to the natural world, and in particular the science of ecosystems.
Simon Levin identifies three features that make ecosystems resilient and adaptive: Diversity, Modularity and Tight Feedback.
Let us take a look at each of these.
Diversity: concerns the number of elements that compose a system - this may be people, species, different businesses or schools. Resilience arising from diversity is related not only to number of participants or members of a system- so the more diverse the system the more resilient, but also from the number of different types of connections that exist between the different participants or members. A good way of thinking about this is to imagine a wheat field, a monoculture such as a wheat field is not a diverse system, whereas the forest is a diverse system because it is biodiverse.
A second type of diversity is found in the difference between systems. Difference between systems in natural systems is a strength, not a weakness. It is Fordism (Kelly in press) that has pushed human thinking towards a deeply held belief in the singularity of approach to all aspects of human endeavour ranging from mass production of commodities through to policy approaches to activity as diverse as farming (where the legal requirements for animal management are the same regardless of herd size) to healthcare and education. However, design and practice may be more efficient in replicable modeling, but they are not necessarily more resilient as a repeat pattern in one context becomes the default pattern across many contexts. The recent collapse in the banking system shows how a commonly held belief in a particular way of operating can have catastrophic results (Soros 2008), and perhaps more pointedly, any challenges to the modus operandi is not tolerated .
We are learning that replication based modeling, which is the idea of exact solutions being taken from one place and dropped into another is not a way to build local resilience. Instead we would anticipate a more resilient approach to the use of successfully identified practices being to locate them into new systems and adapting them according to local configuration and need - each community for example, will nurture and generate its own solutions even when it connects with systems elsewhere. Overall, diversity demonstrates resilience through lots of niche responses and subtle changes to locally defined needs, in effect the political message is that local matters.
Derren Brown, the famous illusionist recently ran a programme on television where he offered a fool-proof service to horse racing punters. The basis of the programme was that he traded on his amazing ability of prediction. He invited people to come forward and place a fixed bet on the winner of a specific horse race. One thousand people responded by putting money on a horse, but here was the rub, Brown spread bet, he covered every horse in the race and thus guaranteed that some of his clientele were going to win. Taking only his winners, who were still committed to the notion that he was able to pick out winners, he repeated the process again and again, slowly thinning down the number of people each time whose horse won the race and always inviting the winning punters to continue to put increasingly large amounts of money on the horses. So punters who stuck with Brown’s winning bets began to win large amounts of money, and being on the inside track so to speak, meant that they were very likely to win again as the suggested bets were from a trusted source, and there was no cause to believe he would fail. Of course, eventually there was only one punter left, who was persuaded to put all her life savings on a horse of Browns choosing. It lost. However, television being what it was, Brown had it covered and she didn’t really lose because he had put the money on a different horse. Thus maintaining the magic, but not after revealing the scam to the trusting woman, and to the audience.
I tell this story because it emphasizes the importance of difference between systems which we have seemingly lost in our pursuit of educational reform. Despite more than two decades of endless change, we still seem no closer to making any real sense out of public sector developments. Public spending on education has gone up and down, according to the colour of the political flag that was in office, but in the main, the plethora of initiatives that successive governments have committed to as drivers of improvement in services have singularly failed to make the grade. We are now in a situation where we need to try a new direction as money is once again short, and there is a growing recognition that we need to redesign service in a way that high standards are established without resorting to spending more than economically we can afford to spend. For some this new agenda is seen as a paradigm change. For most however, I think in reality it will be a variation on the existing theme. Our reform, is simply that, reengineering the existing form, not transforming. Whatever happens, it is very likely that educational service reform will continue to undertake an equivalent of Browns spread betting, sifting only the successful initiatives as evidence of how to improve the system, and leaving on the sideline a growing number of ‘also ran’ schools.
We can see this in the logic underpinning much of the school to school networking taking place. The emphasis on knowledge transfer, replicating across the system any examples in the system of great success, making sure that the champions of these successes are highly visible and ready to make clear for all that will listen what exactly constituted their success (see for example the DCSF Teachers as researchers programme 2007-2009). The findings will then form the basis of the next development in areas that lack the cutting edge knowledge. We are already seeing this in the work of the schools challenge initiative (DCSF 2008). Knowing ‘what works’, is persuasive, it comes with the full backing of government seeking solutions in areas under pressure of greatest need, and as an approach it is endorsed by most of the professional development community who need to be seen to have a body of knowledge and be seen to know how to use it properly.
In this world, certainty plays a very significant part in ensuring that we have an equitable, open opportunity for all. Indeed, this has formed the basis of many recent school improvement initiatives, and certainly underpins much of the concept of what is known as ‘evidence led practice.’ The usual systems of carrot and stick apply, performance will be defined and measured against the implementation and management of the new developments in their new settings. We can presume, as knowledge transfer mechanisms begin to embed, that a few organisations improve, many will drift, some will fail.
It seems clear to me that in our next phase, we need to examine the idea of transformation and challenge the tyranny of certainty vehemently. What we do know about knowledge is that ‘whenever knowledge connects with knowledge, new connections take place. Ideas spawn ideas, which synthesis with each other until more knowledge results. It is completely natural.’ (Verna Allee 1993). We simply don’t know a great deal about how to transform a system in the form of a service that has been around for over a century because until now all we have ever done is reform it. Embracing the reality of ‘not knowing’ is much harder for us to take on board and embed into our organisational psyche. In the previous two phases of public sector reform, under both conservative and labour administrations, professional knowledge was managed in unprecedented ways by reinforcing the assumption that someone out there knew best, and in that certainty, we simply had to find out what it was, where it was, how it worked and how to repeat it somewhere else to make improvements. This may now be proving to be a short sighted approach.
Embracing lack of knowledge places a profession of educators in a very interesting position. It means we have to learn. We have to learn to see the problems differently. It means we have to learn to live with chaotic, diverse and emergent public service rather than assuming a fixed, orthodox approach that will suit all-comers. We need to learn how to create the conditions that are conducive for innovative, creative ideas that can be explored, deepened and connected over time not through procedure and content, but through a philosophy of emergence - a willingness, collectively to listen, study, trial, reflect, reconstruct and communicate with integrity and in a culture of trust. We need to learn to create a learning community, designed around relationships that are focused on emergence (Senge et al 2006).
A third dimension of building resilience comes in what Levin calls modularity. This is concerned with how connections are made. In particular this is concerned with networks and the sharing of information and know how. A resilient system is one that self-organises in the event of a shock. In Robert Axelrod and Michael Cohen's work (Harnessing Complexity (2000) New York. Basic Books) they cite the example of apprenticeships as a good way of thinking about how ideas are passed, developed but do not remain dependent upon any one source. There are many other examples, but the main point is that social networks such as communities can generate resilience through their attention to the different forms of cultural, social and intellectual capital available across a dispersed community of people, it re-emphasises the importance of an acceptance of diversity as a prerequisite of robust resilient community.
Tight feedback: Where the consequences of action is quickly recognised there is less likelihood of inappropriate and continuous adoption of poor solutions. Tight feedback brings home the effect of what we do in any given situation. The selected level of feedback will relate to the types of connections we make with others, and the number of connections we establish - thus the three themes feeding into resilience are themselves interdependent, without each other the system breaks down and is weaker than with them all acting as a coherent whole.
Conclusion
In this chapter I have argued that we are coming to a tipping point in our society where our reserves of a critically important resource – oil, will in less than a generation, move into decline. This raises a series of challenges for our species, at international, national and local levels. In the transition from an oil dependent to a post-oil economy, we will need to find new ways of using the resources we have available, and we will need to establish new structures and systems to suit the changes that will arise from this transition. Using Hopkins (2008) recent terminology, we can usefully think about this challenge as one where we build resilience into our communities. This is an integrated, systems based approach to change which combines personal and collective action at a local level, but pays close attention to systemic implications and possibilities that emerge from strategic intervention.
The next chapter will …
Chapter three: Design
Nearly a decade ago I made a first attempt at a conceptual framework to focus attention on the ways schools might enhance their operational performance in response to the challenge of sustainable community (Clarke 2000). The framework was a taxonomy of reform, designed on an axis of development from a modernist to an ecological paradigm. It represented a dissatisfaction with the school effectiveness and improvement field and an attempt, a flawed attempt as it turned out, to design a way forward through the concept of a learning community. I argued for a shift from the mechanical interpretation of the process of education, to a living systems interpretation of the process of education that was grounded in lived experience that drew more from the ecological than the managed world view. The framework, which tried to provide arguments for ‘learning communities’ of school, subsequently made me draw into question the appropriacy of managerialism as an organising device that would enhance educational improvement, founded as it is within a contrasting world view from that of living systems, where order, predictability, and accountability form the basis of operational practice across both the management and development of the educational journey.
Figure one: A taxonomy of transformation – from a managed to an emergent paradigm (adapted from Clarke 2000)
Mindset of managed change Mindset of change as emergent phenomena
First order dominated – making what already exists more effective and efficient Second order dominated – confronting organizational issues and challenging the orthodoxy
Delivery focused Reflective and process focused
Visionary Innovative, seeking novelty
Change as simplification of self Change as complexification of self
Isolated and individually accountable Collaborative and collectively responsible
It is through the attempts to create learning communities I have come to realise quite how the organisational thinking frame - the narrative of the thought world, dominates organisational improvement. It permeates every aspect of our institutional activity, and yet it remains unsettling as the vehicle of choice for many school leaders who are required to introduce change. I think that this restlessness amongst school leaders is at this stage intuitive, rather than rational (Atkinson and Claxton 2000, Clarke 2002). There is a feeling, that somewhere in the drive for higher performance there is a disconnect between beliefs, values and assumptions of how we might wish to live, and how we are actually living, what Fallon and Barnett (2009) describe as Pseudo Community.
This disconnect is creating turbulence and school leaders are beginning to look outside of the existing school improvement frame. They have become frustrated because they attempt to influence and inform the change process, by attending to the surface structures. Leaders do not, and indeed cannot, base their practical day-to-day decision making on knowledge alone as they pursue change, because that knowledge deals primarily with the surface change of their learning community. To influence what Peter Senge and his colleagues (2004) call ‘deep structure’ we need to tackle the beliefs, values and assumptions people hold and draw upon as they manage their lives. These beliefs, values and assumptions provide the bedrock upon which the ‘surface structure’ (ibid) of rules, procedures and processes become real. The combination of the deep structures and surface structures go a long way to define the activity of a society, an organisation, a community, a classroom, a family. In our case, having a well conceived theoretical framework of how to operationalise a learning community in itself might help us to interpret the reality of the school in a new way, but it hardly serves as a way of scoping human activity to lead towards operationalising a new paradigm, because we still mediate the meaning of learning community through the prevailing dominant narrative.
Paqette and Fallon (in press) discuss these ‘framing’ issues in detail in their recent work. Defining four paradigmatic frames they explore the nature of the learning community that will most likely emerge (see figure), given the thought world in which it functions. Earlier research (Bertrand and Valois 1980) indicated that few schools and school systems operate within the assumptions and values of only one type of paradigm. Nevertheless, they found that teachers and administrators in most learning communities orientate in favour of a single socio-cultural paradigm and a single educational paradigm and that the latter flows from the former.
Figure: Paradigmatic theory frames (adapted from Paquette and Fallon in press)
Managerial paradigm Existentialism paradigm Dialectic paradigm Living systems paradigm
Socio-cultural frame Positivist and economic efficiency assumptions about knowledge and the nature of society A person centered way of understanding self and society Communist and socialist assumptions about knowledge and the nature of society The sustainability of life systems and non-hierarchical complementarity of individuals and communities as ways of being and relating in a society
Educational paradigm frame Characterized by a view of education as an efficient transmission of predetermined knowledge designed to promote rational learning and knowing and maintain a socio-economic order Characterized by a view of education based on empowerment of a creative, confident, and free individual who shapes his/her learning process Characterized by a view of education as a dialectical form of knowing to promote the common good through a process of collectivism and mutual assistance leading to a classless society Characterized by a view of education based on a mode of knowing in which learners develop their capacity to create new alternatives by producing knowledge that promotes a vision of society based on non-hierarchical and democratic decision making and a complementarity of differences
Fallon and Barnett (2009) ask important questions of the fundamental and subsequent direction that learning communities might take. They expose the thought worlds in such a way as it is possible to ask the question: Which one(s) would be most appropriate and (why?) to frame our understanding of the nature and purposes of a learning community constructed in response to a changing environment?
The clear message from this research is that as schools grapple with the wish to create a learning community, they may be locked into a paradigmatic frame that impedes their chance of moving forward, which is accountable to a wider systemic approach that holds to a different set of guiding rules and principles, beliefs and values than those that they may be forming on the ground in response to new understanding of their context. This puts teachers and headteachers, students and parents on a constant collision course where ambition is often impeded by organisation. The different world views can interfere with each other, but they are working from different paradigmatic frames – they are different epistemologies. As a result, the dominant thought world prevails, and school communities find that they are not making the change to a learning community because the dominant thought world impedes the transition.
I discovered that the learning community ideas generated better understanding and provided the context for initially reinforcing but ultimately self-defeating processes of change. Indeed I now think that I deluded myself into thinking that the ideas espoused in our early formulations of learning communities were in any way a radical break from the past. I was attempting to shape and redefine a discourse of change from within an established, dominant world view. Little surprise then, that frustration has triumphed over euphoria.
Despite the failings and frustrations, I have remained closely aligned to the central tenet of the theoretical framework. That is, that we need to make a profound shift in our ‘thought world’ and take it from the mechanical to the living system. In so doing we embed deep into the functionality of any newly posited design, the fundamental truth that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature, we are living beings pursuing our lives within a living system.
Recently, and almost continually during the last two years, I have begun to find ways in which this simple issue, can be achieved and I have watched and participated in a movement that is fast gaining recognition and influence in my local community . Whilst I am now far more realistic and conscious of my own role within this loose affiliation of people and projects, I feel it is time to say something more. At its simplest, I think we can safely say that the existing paradigm is best defined as a deficit model of education, where schools, students and professionals all adhere to a thought world where success is defined by knowing, and that the ‘knowing’ is something that is more often than not defined by someone else, somewhere else. In Michael Fielding’s work this is an issue of democratic representation (Fielding 1997), in Terry Wrigley’s view it is one of class access (Wrigley 2005). From whatever critical position we adopt, it is clear. The resulting ‘catch up’ of those charged with providing the educational service within this knowledge framework is perpetual; no matter how well intentioned and well designed those pursuing learning organisational design from within the existing paradigm will never resolve the problem of ownership and power, because the ownership of the knowledge is beyond the self or the resources of the organisation of the school. This I think serves to compound small successes, and doubly disempowers those who are struggling to deal with existing demands. Second, the entire system that serves to manage and improve education is premised on the first assertion. So we have inspections, national curricula, state mandates, off-the-shelf solutions which schools become ever more obliged to use in order to at least show some semblance of effort to keep in line with the direction of the flow. It is initially reinforcing, people see success, they are reported as improving, they receive adulation, they then buy into the idea that it is the only game in town, and once they do this the likelihood of introducing any alternative design is impeded, significantly.
What we see in educational reform is a repeating pattern, as Seymour Sarason (1990) reported ‘a predictable failure’ lies deep in the managed system, a prevailing misconception about the meaning of educational, and societal change. I maintain that this is no longer sustainable, there are too many externally pressing challenges for business as usual to prevail. It presents us with some significant questions. One being whether we really need schools in their current form any more if their capacity to make the leap to a new paradigm is a practical impossibility? A second being the ways that we might think about how to act, given the need to touch both deep and surface structure. A third being the need to provide some examples of this happening.
Friday, 27 February 2009
Okehampton follows Todmorden on road to self-sufficency from the Daily Telegraph
Residents of the Devon town of Okehampton could be forgiven for thinking the Dartmoor pixies have come down off the moor for a bit of mischief.
All over the town plots of derelict land are being transformed into thriving gardens, and there are apple trees growing on a roundabout.
But the real cause is far from supernatural. A local group, Growing Our Future, has acquired 16 sites in the town and is using them to inspire locals to become more self-sufficient by growing their own food – and enjoying themselves in the process.
The group, based at the town's college, was founded by local artist Beth Hamer, who says she wanted to give something back to her community: "I think it's fair to say there wasn't much of a spark here. There's quite a low socio-economic background and high unemployment.
"Once it was a thriving market town, but now it's a supermarket town, with very few independent traders. It still has the frontage of a high street, with a butcher's shop on it. But behind it are three massive supermarkets."
Inspired by similar community projects such as the one at Todmorden, Beth wants to inspire the town and help it engage with the looming issues of the 21st century: climate change, sustainability and peak oil.
So far Growing our Future have a half-acre garden with raised beds and a polytunnel. They're planning a greenhouse made from recycled bottles. Another site is a forest garden with a large fire pit that people can gather around to socialise.
Recently the group printed a diagram of one plot, the Gateway Garden, in the local paper, inviting readers to submit their own designs.
But as well as reaching out to local people, Beth also works in the town's schools.
"One of the most exciting things for me is not what's happening now, but the kids I'm working with and thinking about what they will be doing," she says. "Some say to me they only come to school for gardening: they love it; they love digging. It's an obvious analogy, but Growing our Future has planted a seed in them, and who knows what that will grow into?"
Some school leavers have already become key organisers.
"It's been a lot of fun; it's inspiring," says recent graduate Dominie Hooper. "At careers day there is always the option to join the army or be a nurse. But there was never any encouragement to do something like this… the project adds another dimension, it really is what kids here need."
Dominie believes that her generation struggles with the weight of issues such as climate change, but that Growing our Future makes it easier to engage with solutions.
"People find it hard to be optimistic, but it's not about restricting yourself, it's just about shifting how you live."
All over the town plots of derelict land are being transformed into thriving gardens, and there are apple trees growing on a roundabout.
But the real cause is far from supernatural. A local group, Growing Our Future, has acquired 16 sites in the town and is using them to inspire locals to become more self-sufficient by growing their own food – and enjoying themselves in the process.
The group, based at the town's college, was founded by local artist Beth Hamer, who says she wanted to give something back to her community: "I think it's fair to say there wasn't much of a spark here. There's quite a low socio-economic background and high unemployment.
"Once it was a thriving market town, but now it's a supermarket town, with very few independent traders. It still has the frontage of a high street, with a butcher's shop on it. But behind it are three massive supermarkets."
Inspired by similar community projects such as the one at Todmorden, Beth wants to inspire the town and help it engage with the looming issues of the 21st century: climate change, sustainability and peak oil.
So far Growing our Future have a half-acre garden with raised beds and a polytunnel. They're planning a greenhouse made from recycled bottles. Another site is a forest garden with a large fire pit that people can gather around to socialise.
Recently the group printed a diagram of one plot, the Gateway Garden, in the local paper, inviting readers to submit their own designs.
But as well as reaching out to local people, Beth also works in the town's schools.
"One of the most exciting things for me is not what's happening now, but the kids I'm working with and thinking about what they will be doing," she says. "Some say to me they only come to school for gardening: they love it; they love digging. It's an obvious analogy, but Growing our Future has planted a seed in them, and who knows what that will grow into?"
Some school leavers have already become key organisers.
"It's been a lot of fun; it's inspiring," says recent graduate Dominie Hooper. "At careers day there is always the option to join the army or be a nurse. But there was never any encouragement to do something like this… the project adds another dimension, it really is what kids here need."
Dominie believes that her generation struggles with the weight of issues such as climate change, but that Growing our Future makes it easier to engage with solutions.
"People find it hard to be optimistic, but it's not about restricting yourself, it's just about shifting how you live."
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
puzzling with the link - school and community
I can’t believe that! Said Alice ‘…one can’t believe impossible things.’ ‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half and hour a day. Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.’
Lewis Caroll, Through the looking glass
So far I have suggested that we are living through a period of considerable redefinition of the role, function and purpose of many of our previously cherished institutions.
In exploring the idea of a sustainable community, and the creative process that is required to nurture such an idea, I have struggled to reconcile one significant part of community that already exists and plays, or at least can play, a prominent role in leading and providing guidance as we move forward. I am referring to the school.
The school is not alone in being drawn into question in regard to role, function and purpose. It is however, perhaps alone in being an example of human community which can transcend existing boundaries with relative ease.
It is widely reported that the conventional model of school is now fully operationalised and in considerable need of reconceptualisation (see for example the current consultation exercise underway by the UK government DCSF 2009). In examining the possibilities of sustainable communities it seems eminently sensible to consider the transformation of school alongside the transition of commuity from oil to post oil existence. Many of the same messages of community change can be found in the discourse of school reform, and central to any action that has integrity is the relationships between people connected with school – parents, students, families, businesses, and teachers and other staff. They need to be involved not as onlookers, but as participants in the story, ‘not mere onlookers, watching the show’ (Clarke 2000) but players.
To achieve this goal, of establishing learning places that have meaning, resonance and are valued within communities as knowledge creating and knowledge using facilities people need to feel they are able to exercise real power. It is not enough to consult on what schools might be like for the 21st century. The process is meaningless when people are presented with a series of solutions and asked to state their preferences. Practical engagement with people as they create community is an exercise in connecting to real social capital, intellectual capital, cultural capital and knowledge capital. In any other way, for example through consultation processes that serve as little more than staff development sessions, participants are left deskilled and dependent on other people’s models. This inhibits, not enables progress. To fully operationalise community for learning and living sustainably we need to engage people in thinking about what they might like to see change, we need to explore their visions and aspirations and help them to tell their different stories in such a way that enables them to see how they might implement and sustain their ambitions. An ethos which permits innovation and stimulates individual and collective responsibility promotes continuous initiative, it provides a context for novelty - a place and a space for impossible things.
Lewis Caroll, Through the looking glass
So far I have suggested that we are living through a period of considerable redefinition of the role, function and purpose of many of our previously cherished institutions.
In exploring the idea of a sustainable community, and the creative process that is required to nurture such an idea, I have struggled to reconcile one significant part of community that already exists and plays, or at least can play, a prominent role in leading and providing guidance as we move forward. I am referring to the school.
The school is not alone in being drawn into question in regard to role, function and purpose. It is however, perhaps alone in being an example of human community which can transcend existing boundaries with relative ease.
It is widely reported that the conventional model of school is now fully operationalised and in considerable need of reconceptualisation (see for example the current consultation exercise underway by the UK government DCSF 2009). In examining the possibilities of sustainable communities it seems eminently sensible to consider the transformation of school alongside the transition of commuity from oil to post oil existence. Many of the same messages of community change can be found in the discourse of school reform, and central to any action that has integrity is the relationships between people connected with school – parents, students, families, businesses, and teachers and other staff. They need to be involved not as onlookers, but as participants in the story, ‘not mere onlookers, watching the show’ (Clarke 2000) but players.
To achieve this goal, of establishing learning places that have meaning, resonance and are valued within communities as knowledge creating and knowledge using facilities people need to feel they are able to exercise real power. It is not enough to consult on what schools might be like for the 21st century. The process is meaningless when people are presented with a series of solutions and asked to state their preferences. Practical engagement with people as they create community is an exercise in connecting to real social capital, intellectual capital, cultural capital and knowledge capital. In any other way, for example through consultation processes that serve as little more than staff development sessions, participants are left deskilled and dependent on other people’s models. This inhibits, not enables progress. To fully operationalise community for learning and living sustainably we need to engage people in thinking about what they might like to see change, we need to explore their visions and aspirations and help them to tell their different stories in such a way that enables them to see how they might implement and sustain their ambitions. An ethos which permits innovation and stimulates individual and collective responsibility promotes continuous initiative, it provides a context for novelty - a place and a space for impossible things.
Monday, 23 February 2009
methodology...
back to working on the methodological issues of the book, this has been exercising much of my time in the last weeks and as yet it is not cracked but the basic issues are coming clearer.
If the process of creating sustainable community is to succeed then it needs to be compelling enough for public support - and political weight to back it - to make its way through such tests then it is likely that at some point the question of measure will arise. Knowing what effect an initiative has had is a fair enough question to raise. The difficulty is that the existing measures do not necessarily provide an adequate way of framing the transition issues.
I have been looking again at the permaculture process headings and playing with them not as a sequenced process, but as a set of possible indicators through which we might examine different aspects of the sustainable community activity - this seems to be quite productive, as one can begin at any point along the range of themes, and I think, without any obvious impediment, jump about from theme to theme and begin to construct evidence around the themes to inform and substantiate particular lines of development.
As an earlier post indicated, the themes can generate sub-questions - these are linked below
observation: what is happening here?
boundaries: what are these? why?
resources: what will we retain, what will we leave?
evaluation: where are the connections being identified? Are values and principles being attended to in our development?
maintenance: what relationships do we need to support and nurture?
implementation: what structures will enhance the system?
design: what do we / are we creating?
By gathering data against each heading / theme it is possible to get a strong sense of the whole of the initiative without resorting to the routine ways that impede connection, emotion, values and principles.
If the process of creating sustainable community is to succeed then it needs to be compelling enough for public support - and political weight to back it - to make its way through such tests then it is likely that at some point the question of measure will arise. Knowing what effect an initiative has had is a fair enough question to raise. The difficulty is that the existing measures do not necessarily provide an adequate way of framing the transition issues.
I have been looking again at the permaculture process headings and playing with them not as a sequenced process, but as a set of possible indicators through which we might examine different aspects of the sustainable community activity - this seems to be quite productive, as one can begin at any point along the range of themes, and I think, without any obvious impediment, jump about from theme to theme and begin to construct evidence around the themes to inform and substantiate particular lines of development.
As an earlier post indicated, the themes can generate sub-questions - these are linked below
observation: what is happening here?
boundaries: what are these? why?
resources: what will we retain, what will we leave?
evaluation: where are the connections being identified? Are values and principles being attended to in our development?
maintenance: what relationships do we need to support and nurture?
implementation: what structures will enhance the system?
design: what do we / are we creating?
By gathering data against each heading / theme it is possible to get a strong sense of the whole of the initiative without resorting to the routine ways that impede connection, emotion, values and principles.
more on eggs and things
Last weekend saw the first public stall in the market promoting the local egg production project. It was well supported and many people have signed up to provide and to purchase eggs from local growers.
Weekend before saw the first planting day of the season where a group of more than 100 people planted fruit trees and bushes on a piece of public land to create the first of what we hope will be many community orchards.
Further publicity on the programme came through an article in The Times on the project, mixed reception from local people on its tone, but all publicity is good publicity...
Weekend before saw the first planting day of the season where a group of more than 100 people planted fruit trees and bushes on a piece of public land to create the first of what we hope will be many community orchards.
Further publicity on the programme came through an article in The Times on the project, mixed reception from local people on its tone, but all publicity is good publicity...
compelling narratives
We will be following on from the success of the Cuban night very shortly with an evening of story lines. Our intention is to explore what brings people to the table to our incredible edible meetings and events. Instead of going along the route of building a single narrative of the incredible edible story it seems much more sensible to see how diverse the story is, and so we will invite everyone that comes to the meeting to share their own personal journey with someone else in the room - and then we will build something of a collective map of these journeys together.
The outcomes will be posted later.
The outcomes will be posted later.
Friday, 13 February 2009
Obama is given climate warning
President Obama was told yesterday that he has four years to save the wold from climate change. Prof James McCarthy, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said major policy changes were needed in Mr Obama's first term. 'We have a moment of extraordinary opportunity with a new president positioned with scientific leadership that has known no equal in recent times. he said.
Source: Daily Telegraph page 16, 13th February 2009
Source: Daily Telegraph page 16, 13th February 2009
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
green classes in schools
'Green' Classes Flourish in Schools
By Sean Cavanagh from ed week site
Solar-powered cars have barely begun to inch out of test laboratories onto the difficult road to commercial viability.
But miniature versions of that technology are already being churned out at Whitmore Lake High School.
Students at the Michigan school have designed shoebox-size cars, made of foam board, toothpicks, and solar panels, as part of a new class called Green Tech. It’s just one of the many courses focused on renewable and alternative energy that are taking hold across the country as educators seek to channel students’ concerns about the environment and conservation into classroom lessons.
Some schools are creating elective science courses on alternative energy, or expanding lessons on that topic within existing science courses. Others have launched applied-science or career-oriented classes, or those that focus mostly on technology, as is the case at Whitmore Lake, located in a 1,200-student district a half-hour west of Detroit.
The Green Tech class has drawn some of the school’s top students, as well as struggling learners, said Jen Taylor, who teaches the class. Some teenagers are intrigued by renewable technology; others are convinced it will become more important to society, and employers, in the years ahead.
“It’s really exciting to students, even those I never would have thought would be into it,” Ms. Taylor said. For some, “it’s a realization that this [area] is where there’s going to be a job,” she said. “I hope I’m preparing some of them for a line of work.”
Workers install solar panels on the roof of Walden III Middle and High School in Racine, Wis., in December. Some teachers tie lessons to environmentally friendly building designs.
—Mark Hertzberg/Journal times/AP
Jake Kerrigan, 16, said he was drawn in because of his overall interest in science and a curiosity about alternative power. He signed up for the elective around the time that gas prices in Michigan had soared to well over $3 a gallon. He has heard leaders in his state—the iconic heart of the United States’ struggling auto industry—talk about the need to invest in alternative energy. He believes them.
Green Tech offered the chance to look at “the direction we’re heading in the world,” the junior said, “and how we’re going to transition from our wasteful way of life.”
Sun, Wind, and T. Boone
The Green Tech class introduces students to the mechanics and economics of renewable technologies, including solar, wind, geothermal, and hydrogen fuel-cells. Hands-on activities are an integral part of those lessons. Mr. Kerrigan’s favorite task was the construction of models of solar-powered cars. That assignment ended with an all-class race in the school parking lot.
Working in groups, Mr. Kerrigan and his classmates spent four periods working on the car, which was about 9 inches long and 7 inches high. They used materials such as cardboard and straw, and small wheels, axles, and gears. Mr. Kerrigan and his team mounted a small solar panel on their car’s roof, experimenting with its angle so it would capture maximum light—a design issue they had studied in class. They used real solar panels that the school purchased from Solar World, a Colorado-based company.
Students in Green Tech also study carbon dioxide emissions and each technology’s potential to reduce greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. They’ve examined energy proposals such as the “Pickens Plan,” oil magnate T. Boone Pickens’ proposal to expand greatly U.S. wind-power production and the use of natural gas to wean the country off foreign oil.
Whitmore Lake’s students are absorbing energy lessons in other ways, too. Their school has received recognition from the U.S. Green Building Council for its environmentally sound features, which include a geothermal heating system with 47 miles of underground tubing. Ms. Taylor talks about the school’s efficient features in her classes. Other teachers around the country, some of whom work in solar-powered schools, do the same.
Ms. Taylor created her class with help from Creative Learning Systems, a Longmont, Colo.-based company that helps schools design lessons. The company emphasizes hands-on activities and the in-class integration of science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, topics. Creative Learning Systems piloted lesson plans at Whitmore Lake that it hopes to market to other schools, said Matt Dickstein, its chief executive officer.
In Search of Curriculum
Like many educators, however, Ms. Taylor has also been forced to track down many renewable-energy resources on her own, mostly because no single set of materials meets her needs. She has drawn from a number of Web sites, including that of the National Energy Education Development Project. That organization, located in Manassas, Va., devises curriculum on energy issues and supports teaching of those topics.
One likely reason teachers are searching for classroom resources on renewable energy is that the topic has not yet made it into many state academic standards, said Jo Ellen Roseman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Washington.
State standards, which guide teaching and tests, tend to set expectations for students to learn basic principles of energy. But guidelines about conservation and renewable energy are much less common, she said. Ms. Roseman helped write science standards at the AAAS that have served as models for many states. She now directs the AAAS’ Project 2061, an effort to improve science education and literacy.
In districts and schools where renewable-energy courses have taken hold, their popularity can be attributed not only to public concerns about climate change and the environment, but to a conviction that the number of “clean energy” jobs will increase, said Karen Heys, the senior director of education at the National Environmental Education Foundation, a Washington organization that promotes environmental awareness in schools and society.
“It’s one of the few growth industries right now,” Ms. Heys said.
As evidence, she pointed to a 2008 survey of 1,300 employers conducted by her organization. Sixty-five percent of respondents said they valued job applicants’ knowledge about “environment and sustainability,” and 78 percent said they believe it will increase as a hiring factor in the future.
Her organization has seen the number of visitors to its Web site seeking energy-related curricular materials rise sharply. In addition, when the organization made energy issues the theme of its annual National Environmental Education Week in 2007, it saw the number of its “partner” organizations—schools and other groups that agree to help promote environmental awareness—spike to more than 1,400, from 330 the previous year, Ms. Heys said.
Political Winds?
Despite rising interest in “green” curriculum, it is not unusual for teachers covering energy topics to draw criticism from students and parents who accuse them of promoting an environmentally oriented political agenda.
Ms. Taylor has heard those objections. When she first began teaching Green Tech, she heard students refer to it as “the hippie class” or the “tree-hugger class.” One of her students, she said, was adamant that global warming was a hoax, despite strong scientific evidence that it is occurring and that humans are contributing to it.
She says she tries to address those concerns by focusing on the science and the broader financial and economic realities of alternative energy. Renewable technologies, for example, are more expensive than fossil fuels in many applications despite renewables’ environmental benefits.
That teaching strategy makes sense, said Ms. Roseman of the AAAS. Renewable-energy technology may be “on the edge of science,” in the sense that it is changing quickly, she said. But educators still can have engaging and scientifically accurate discussions of those technologies, their benefits, and limitations, she said.
“Acknowledge what scientists know, and what they don’t know,” Ms. Roseman advises teachers.
The chance to study fast-emerging technologies—and the opportunity to try building one of them from scratch—was an easy sell to Jake Kerrigan at Whitmore Lake High School.
His team’s construction of a solar-powered car brought thrills and frustrations. While some of their classmates constructed box-shaped vehicles, Mr. Kerrigan’s team set out to build a relatively sleek model, with an “I” shape, which would operate on rear-wheel power.
“Lighter, longer, skinnier,” was how he described it.
One absolute necessity was to make sure the wheels were straight, for efficiency’s sake. They also had to overcome a major engineering glitch with the wiring. If it was too far from the solar panel to the wheels, they discovered, the car wouldn’t have enough power.
Until the day of the race, the car wasn’t working. But with a few final adjustments, it took off, powering forward at “about a jogging pace,” said Mr. Kerrigan. That was fast enough to claim first place.
“Everything just came together,” its co-creator said.
Coverage of mathematics, science, and technology education is supported by a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, at www.kauffman.org.
By Sean Cavanagh from ed week site
Solar-powered cars have barely begun to inch out of test laboratories onto the difficult road to commercial viability.
But miniature versions of that technology are already being churned out at Whitmore Lake High School.
Students at the Michigan school have designed shoebox-size cars, made of foam board, toothpicks, and solar panels, as part of a new class called Green Tech. It’s just one of the many courses focused on renewable and alternative energy that are taking hold across the country as educators seek to channel students’ concerns about the environment and conservation into classroom lessons.
Some schools are creating elective science courses on alternative energy, or expanding lessons on that topic within existing science courses. Others have launched applied-science or career-oriented classes, or those that focus mostly on technology, as is the case at Whitmore Lake, located in a 1,200-student district a half-hour west of Detroit.
The Green Tech class has drawn some of the school’s top students, as well as struggling learners, said Jen Taylor, who teaches the class. Some teenagers are intrigued by renewable technology; others are convinced it will become more important to society, and employers, in the years ahead.
“It’s really exciting to students, even those I never would have thought would be into it,” Ms. Taylor said. For some, “it’s a realization that this [area] is where there’s going to be a job,” she said. “I hope I’m preparing some of them for a line of work.”
Workers install solar panels on the roof of Walden III Middle and High School in Racine, Wis., in December. Some teachers tie lessons to environmentally friendly building designs.
—Mark Hertzberg/Journal times/AP
Jake Kerrigan, 16, said he was drawn in because of his overall interest in science and a curiosity about alternative power. He signed up for the elective around the time that gas prices in Michigan had soared to well over $3 a gallon. He has heard leaders in his state—the iconic heart of the United States’ struggling auto industry—talk about the need to invest in alternative energy. He believes them.
Green Tech offered the chance to look at “the direction we’re heading in the world,” the junior said, “and how we’re going to transition from our wasteful way of life.”
Sun, Wind, and T. Boone
The Green Tech class introduces students to the mechanics and economics of renewable technologies, including solar, wind, geothermal, and hydrogen fuel-cells. Hands-on activities are an integral part of those lessons. Mr. Kerrigan’s favorite task was the construction of models of solar-powered cars. That assignment ended with an all-class race in the school parking lot.
Working in groups, Mr. Kerrigan and his classmates spent four periods working on the car, which was about 9 inches long and 7 inches high. They used materials such as cardboard and straw, and small wheels, axles, and gears. Mr. Kerrigan and his team mounted a small solar panel on their car’s roof, experimenting with its angle so it would capture maximum light—a design issue they had studied in class. They used real solar panels that the school purchased from Solar World, a Colorado-based company.
Students in Green Tech also study carbon dioxide emissions and each technology’s potential to reduce greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. They’ve examined energy proposals such as the “Pickens Plan,” oil magnate T. Boone Pickens’ proposal to expand greatly U.S. wind-power production and the use of natural gas to wean the country off foreign oil.
Whitmore Lake’s students are absorbing energy lessons in other ways, too. Their school has received recognition from the U.S. Green Building Council for its environmentally sound features, which include a geothermal heating system with 47 miles of underground tubing. Ms. Taylor talks about the school’s efficient features in her classes. Other teachers around the country, some of whom work in solar-powered schools, do the same.
Ms. Taylor created her class with help from Creative Learning Systems, a Longmont, Colo.-based company that helps schools design lessons. The company emphasizes hands-on activities and the in-class integration of science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM, topics. Creative Learning Systems piloted lesson plans at Whitmore Lake that it hopes to market to other schools, said Matt Dickstein, its chief executive officer.
In Search of Curriculum
Like many educators, however, Ms. Taylor has also been forced to track down many renewable-energy resources on her own, mostly because no single set of materials meets her needs. She has drawn from a number of Web sites, including that of the National Energy Education Development Project. That organization, located in Manassas, Va., devises curriculum on energy issues and supports teaching of those topics.
One likely reason teachers are searching for classroom resources on renewable energy is that the topic has not yet made it into many state academic standards, said Jo Ellen Roseman of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Washington.
State standards, which guide teaching and tests, tend to set expectations for students to learn basic principles of energy. But guidelines about conservation and renewable energy are much less common, she said. Ms. Roseman helped write science standards at the AAAS that have served as models for many states. She now directs the AAAS’ Project 2061, an effort to improve science education and literacy.
In districts and schools where renewable-energy courses have taken hold, their popularity can be attributed not only to public concerns about climate change and the environment, but to a conviction that the number of “clean energy” jobs will increase, said Karen Heys, the senior director of education at the National Environmental Education Foundation, a Washington organization that promotes environmental awareness in schools and society.
“It’s one of the few growth industries right now,” Ms. Heys said.
As evidence, she pointed to a 2008 survey of 1,300 employers conducted by her organization. Sixty-five percent of respondents said they valued job applicants’ knowledge about “environment and sustainability,” and 78 percent said they believe it will increase as a hiring factor in the future.
Her organization has seen the number of visitors to its Web site seeking energy-related curricular materials rise sharply. In addition, when the organization made energy issues the theme of its annual National Environmental Education Week in 2007, it saw the number of its “partner” organizations—schools and other groups that agree to help promote environmental awareness—spike to more than 1,400, from 330 the previous year, Ms. Heys said.
Political Winds?
Despite rising interest in “green” curriculum, it is not unusual for teachers covering energy topics to draw criticism from students and parents who accuse them of promoting an environmentally oriented political agenda.
Ms. Taylor has heard those objections. When she first began teaching Green Tech, she heard students refer to it as “the hippie class” or the “tree-hugger class.” One of her students, she said, was adamant that global warming was a hoax, despite strong scientific evidence that it is occurring and that humans are contributing to it.
She says she tries to address those concerns by focusing on the science and the broader financial and economic realities of alternative energy. Renewable technologies, for example, are more expensive than fossil fuels in many applications despite renewables’ environmental benefits.
That teaching strategy makes sense, said Ms. Roseman of the AAAS. Renewable-energy technology may be “on the edge of science,” in the sense that it is changing quickly, she said. But educators still can have engaging and scientifically accurate discussions of those technologies, their benefits, and limitations, she said.
“Acknowledge what scientists know, and what they don’t know,” Ms. Roseman advises teachers.
The chance to study fast-emerging technologies—and the opportunity to try building one of them from scratch—was an easy sell to Jake Kerrigan at Whitmore Lake High School.
His team’s construction of a solar-powered car brought thrills and frustrations. While some of their classmates constructed box-shaped vehicles, Mr. Kerrigan’s team set out to build a relatively sleek model, with an “I” shape, which would operate on rear-wheel power.
“Lighter, longer, skinnier,” was how he described it.
One absolute necessity was to make sure the wheels were straight, for efficiency’s sake. They also had to overcome a major engineering glitch with the wiring. If it was too far from the solar panel to the wheels, they discovered, the car wouldn’t have enough power.
Until the day of the race, the car wasn’t working. But with a few final adjustments, it took off, powering forward at “about a jogging pace,” said Mr. Kerrigan. That was fast enough to claim first place.
“Everything just came together,” its co-creator said.
Coverage of mathematics, science, and technology education is supported by a grant from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, at www.kauffman.org.
Sunday, 1 February 2009
centre for ecoliteracy
Recent browsing across the web has proved as productive as ever. In particular the links with the centre for ecoliteracy.
I am particularly taken by the simplicity of message in their four central principles of schooling for sustainability:
Nature is our teacher
Sustainability is a community practice
The real world is the optimal learning environment
Sustainable living is rooted in a deep knowledge of place
I am particularly taken by the simplicity of message in their four central principles of schooling for sustainability:
Nature is our teacher
Sustainability is a community practice
The real world is the optimal learning environment
Sustainable living is rooted in a deep knowledge of place
Monday, 26 January 2009
SLOW FOOD, SLOW SCHOOLS
Taken from the edible schoolyard website - written by Alice Waters
For me life is given meaning and beauty by the daily ritual of the table—a ritual that can express tradition, character, sustainability, and diversity. These are some of the values that I learned almost unconsciously at my family table as a child. But what beliefs and values do today's children learn at the table? And at whose table do they dine?
The family meal has undergone a steady devaluation from its one time role at the center of human life, when it was the daily enactment of shared necessity and ritualized cooperation. Today, as never before in history, the meals of children are likely to have been cooked by strangers, to consist of highly processed foods that are produced far away, and are likely to be taken casually, greedily, in haste, and, all too often, alone.
I believe public education must help restore the daily ritual of the table in all our childrens' lives. Public education has the required democratic reach. And it desperately needs a curriculum that offers alternatives to the fast-food messages that saturate our contemporary culture. These messages tell us that food is cheap and abundant. That abundance is permanent; that resources are infinite; that it';s okay to waste; that standardization is more important than quality; and that speed is a virtue above all others.
Fast food values are pervasive (especially in poor communities) and often where they least belong. Recently I visited a museum of natural history, for example, which celebrates the astonishing diversity of world cultures, the beauty of human workmanship, and the wonders of nature. It even houses an impressive collection of artifacts relating to food: tools and depictions of hunting, foraging, agriculture, food preparation, and the hearth.
But in the museum cafeteria, crowds of people queue up in a poorly lit, depressing space as if in a diorama of late-twentieth century life, surrounded by that unmistakable steam table smell of pre-cooked, portion-controlled food. In this marvelous museum, surrounded on all sides by splendid exhibits that celebrate the complexity of life and the diversity of human achievement, people appear to have stopped thinking when it comes to their very own everyday experience. People appear to be oblivious that the cafeteria represents the antitheses of the values celebrated in the museum.
Yet a museum cafeteria could have delighted the senses. It could have been beautiful and made you think. It could have served delicious meals in ways that teach where food comes from and how it is made. And when you returned your tray you could have learned something about composting and recycling. You could even have a little friendly human interaction, had the cafeteria been designed to encourage it. It could have inspired you to head out of the museum and see the world in a different way. Instead it was like a filling station.
Our system of public education operates in the same strange, no-context zone of hollow fast-food values. Maurice Holt, professor emeritus of the University of Colorado, has observed that public education today has little philosophical grounding and is relatively unconcerned with tradition and character. In school cafeterias, students learn how little we care about the way they nourish themselves—we’ve sold them to the lowest bidder. Soda machines line the hallways. At best we serve them government-subsidized agricultural surplus, at worst we invite fast food restaurants to open on school grounds. Children need only compare the slickness of the nearest mall to the condition of their school and the quality of its library to learn that they are more important as consumers than as students.
What we need is a systematic overhaul of education inspired by the International Slow Food movement. This eco-gastronomic movement celebrates diversity, tradition, and character and what it’s founder, Carlo Petrini, calls “quiet material pleasure.” This is exactly what Maurice Holt has proposed. “Slow Schools” would promote community by allowing room for discovery and room for paying attention. Concentration and judgment and all the other slow food values that testing cannot measure would be given a chance to flourish.
How do we begin to turn the public schools into slow schools? The Edible Schoolyard at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, in Berkeley, California, provides a hopeful model. King School is a public school with about 1,000 students in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It is an astonishingly diverse group, socially, economically, and culturally—over twenty languages are spoken in the students’ homes. A decade ago, this school was surrounded by large schoolyard covered with blacktop. The school’s cafeteria had been closed because it was no longer large enough to accommodate all the students. Microwaved, packaged food was sold from a shack at the end of the parking lot.
Members of the community dismayed by the state of the school began speaking with other parents and teachers. We noticed that the blacktop schoolyard was large enough for an enormous garden and talked about initiating an edible landscape. We suggested that the students could plant and care for a garden and even learn to cook, serve, and sit down and eat together in a renovated cafeteria and lunchroom. These ideas would have been nothing more than well-intentioned fantasies had King School not had an enlightened principal. He understood that a new school garden and a renovated cafeteria and lunchroom meant more just the beautification of school grounds. He understood that these were the central elements of a revolution in both the lunch program and the entire school curriculum.
Presently the Edible Schoolyard consists of a one-acre organic garden and a kitchen-classroom. In the garden, students are involved in all aspects of planting and cultivation; and in the kitchen-classroom, they prepare, serve, and eat food, some of which they have grown themselves. These activities are woven into the curriculum and are part of the school day. A new ecologically designed cafeteria is being built and the program is preparing for the transformation of the school lunch program. When the cafeteria has been built, lunch will be an everyday, hands-on experience and an essential part of the life of the school.
Such a curriculum is not a new idea in education. Waldorf schools and Montessori schools, among others, practice similar experiential, value-oriented approaches to learning based on participation. This kind of participatory learning makes all the difference when it comes to opening minds. The Edible Schoolyard, for instance, has shown that if you offer children a new dish, there’s no better than a fifty-fifty chance they will choose it. But if they’ve been introduced to the dish ahead of time, and if they have helped prepare it, they will all want to try it.
Learning is supposed to be a pleasure, and a food-centered curriculum is a way to reach kids in a way that is truly pleasurable. At first, the kids may not quite believe that they are allowed to have so much fun outside in the garden. But before long, they all know what compost is. And all know what’s ripe and what’s not ripe, and when. This is knowledge they have learned without realizing it from experiences like picking the raspberry patch clean every morning. While they are touching, and smelling, and tasting, so much information floods in—because they are using all of their senses. What better way to learn about geography than by combining twenty seven aromatic spices to make an Indian curry?
This is the beauty of a sensory education: the way all the doors into your mind are thrown wide open at once. Esther Cook, who teaches in the kitchen at King school, says it so beautifully: “the senses are truly the great equalizer. They are the key to a beautiful life, a really fulfilling life, and they are available to anybody.”
A slow school education is an opportunity that should be universally available—the more so because kids aren’t eating at home with their families anymore. In fact, in the United States, many children never eat with their families (an observation confirmed by our experience at King School). Our most democratic institution, the public school system, now has an obligation to feed our children in a civilized way around a table. And students should be asked to participate—not just as a practical life exercise, but as a way of putting beauty and meaning into their lives.
There are countless ways to weave a food program into the curriculum at every level of education. The creation of the Slow Food University in Pollenzo, Italy, which will open next fall, clearly shows the seriousness and wide reach of an eco-gastronomic perspective. It is reconfiguring gastronomy as a subject of academic inquiry. The depth and breadth of the subject—its relevance in ecology, anthropology, history, physiology, and art—assures it could easily be integrated into academic studies of every school, from the kindergarten to the university.
Now if every school had a lunch program that served its students only local products that had been sustainably farmed, imagine what it would mean for agriculture. Today, twenty percent of the population of the United States is in school. If all these students were eating lunch together, consuming local, organic food, agriculture would change overnight to meet the demand. Our domestic food culture would change as well, as people again grew up learning how to cook affordable, wholesome, and delicious food.
To make this a reality we need more model programs at all levels; when these models are good enough, we will have the momentum to seek the mandate and the money to make them a reality throughout the country. We know from experience that it can be done.
Forty years ago, a presidential commission in America told us our children were physically unfit and that we had to launch a national physical fitness program. The country responded by building gymnasiums, buying equipment and training new physical education teachers, and by making physical education a required part of the curriculum in every school. Today we are worried anew over the health of our children. Child obesity is shocking, and at the present rate of increase, one out of every three children can be expected to develop diabetes, and for African American children, the statistic is one out of every two. We must respond by bringing real food, nutritious food, back into the schools and into the curriculum. We must create new incentives for educators to integrate real food into the lives of their students. Perhaps the best and most radical way to do this is to give credit for school lunch, just as credit is given for physical education or for math or science. This would add a new dimension of integrity to the lunchroom, placing it on a par with the classroom, and breathing new life and dignity into learning how to eat.
What we are calling for is a revolution in public education—a real Delicious Revolution. When the hearts and minds of our children are captured by a school lunch curriculum, enriched with experience in the garden, sustainability will become the lens through which they see the world.
For me life is given meaning and beauty by the daily ritual of the table—a ritual that can express tradition, character, sustainability, and diversity. These are some of the values that I learned almost unconsciously at my family table as a child. But what beliefs and values do today's children learn at the table? And at whose table do they dine?
The family meal has undergone a steady devaluation from its one time role at the center of human life, when it was the daily enactment of shared necessity and ritualized cooperation. Today, as never before in history, the meals of children are likely to have been cooked by strangers, to consist of highly processed foods that are produced far away, and are likely to be taken casually, greedily, in haste, and, all too often, alone.
I believe public education must help restore the daily ritual of the table in all our childrens' lives. Public education has the required democratic reach. And it desperately needs a curriculum that offers alternatives to the fast-food messages that saturate our contemporary culture. These messages tell us that food is cheap and abundant. That abundance is permanent; that resources are infinite; that it';s okay to waste; that standardization is more important than quality; and that speed is a virtue above all others.
Fast food values are pervasive (especially in poor communities) and often where they least belong. Recently I visited a museum of natural history, for example, which celebrates the astonishing diversity of world cultures, the beauty of human workmanship, and the wonders of nature. It even houses an impressive collection of artifacts relating to food: tools and depictions of hunting, foraging, agriculture, food preparation, and the hearth.
But in the museum cafeteria, crowds of people queue up in a poorly lit, depressing space as if in a diorama of late-twentieth century life, surrounded by that unmistakable steam table smell of pre-cooked, portion-controlled food. In this marvelous museum, surrounded on all sides by splendid exhibits that celebrate the complexity of life and the diversity of human achievement, people appear to have stopped thinking when it comes to their very own everyday experience. People appear to be oblivious that the cafeteria represents the antitheses of the values celebrated in the museum.
Yet a museum cafeteria could have delighted the senses. It could have been beautiful and made you think. It could have served delicious meals in ways that teach where food comes from and how it is made. And when you returned your tray you could have learned something about composting and recycling. You could even have a little friendly human interaction, had the cafeteria been designed to encourage it. It could have inspired you to head out of the museum and see the world in a different way. Instead it was like a filling station.
Our system of public education operates in the same strange, no-context zone of hollow fast-food values. Maurice Holt, professor emeritus of the University of Colorado, has observed that public education today has little philosophical grounding and is relatively unconcerned with tradition and character. In school cafeterias, students learn how little we care about the way they nourish themselves—we’ve sold them to the lowest bidder. Soda machines line the hallways. At best we serve them government-subsidized agricultural surplus, at worst we invite fast food restaurants to open on school grounds. Children need only compare the slickness of the nearest mall to the condition of their school and the quality of its library to learn that they are more important as consumers than as students.
What we need is a systematic overhaul of education inspired by the International Slow Food movement. This eco-gastronomic movement celebrates diversity, tradition, and character and what it’s founder, Carlo Petrini, calls “quiet material pleasure.” This is exactly what Maurice Holt has proposed. “Slow Schools” would promote community by allowing room for discovery and room for paying attention. Concentration and judgment and all the other slow food values that testing cannot measure would be given a chance to flourish.
How do we begin to turn the public schools into slow schools? The Edible Schoolyard at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School, in Berkeley, California, provides a hopeful model. King School is a public school with about 1,000 students in the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. It is an astonishingly diverse group, socially, economically, and culturally—over twenty languages are spoken in the students’ homes. A decade ago, this school was surrounded by large schoolyard covered with blacktop. The school’s cafeteria had been closed because it was no longer large enough to accommodate all the students. Microwaved, packaged food was sold from a shack at the end of the parking lot.
Members of the community dismayed by the state of the school began speaking with other parents and teachers. We noticed that the blacktop schoolyard was large enough for an enormous garden and talked about initiating an edible landscape. We suggested that the students could plant and care for a garden and even learn to cook, serve, and sit down and eat together in a renovated cafeteria and lunchroom. These ideas would have been nothing more than well-intentioned fantasies had King School not had an enlightened principal. He understood that a new school garden and a renovated cafeteria and lunchroom meant more just the beautification of school grounds. He understood that these were the central elements of a revolution in both the lunch program and the entire school curriculum.
Presently the Edible Schoolyard consists of a one-acre organic garden and a kitchen-classroom. In the garden, students are involved in all aspects of planting and cultivation; and in the kitchen-classroom, they prepare, serve, and eat food, some of which they have grown themselves. These activities are woven into the curriculum and are part of the school day. A new ecologically designed cafeteria is being built and the program is preparing for the transformation of the school lunch program. When the cafeteria has been built, lunch will be an everyday, hands-on experience and an essential part of the life of the school.
Such a curriculum is not a new idea in education. Waldorf schools and Montessori schools, among others, practice similar experiential, value-oriented approaches to learning based on participation. This kind of participatory learning makes all the difference when it comes to opening minds. The Edible Schoolyard, for instance, has shown that if you offer children a new dish, there’s no better than a fifty-fifty chance they will choose it. But if they’ve been introduced to the dish ahead of time, and if they have helped prepare it, they will all want to try it.
Learning is supposed to be a pleasure, and a food-centered curriculum is a way to reach kids in a way that is truly pleasurable. At first, the kids may not quite believe that they are allowed to have so much fun outside in the garden. But before long, they all know what compost is. And all know what’s ripe and what’s not ripe, and when. This is knowledge they have learned without realizing it from experiences like picking the raspberry patch clean every morning. While they are touching, and smelling, and tasting, so much information floods in—because they are using all of their senses. What better way to learn about geography than by combining twenty seven aromatic spices to make an Indian curry?
This is the beauty of a sensory education: the way all the doors into your mind are thrown wide open at once. Esther Cook, who teaches in the kitchen at King school, says it so beautifully: “the senses are truly the great equalizer. They are the key to a beautiful life, a really fulfilling life, and they are available to anybody.”
A slow school education is an opportunity that should be universally available—the more so because kids aren’t eating at home with their families anymore. In fact, in the United States, many children never eat with their families (an observation confirmed by our experience at King School). Our most democratic institution, the public school system, now has an obligation to feed our children in a civilized way around a table. And students should be asked to participate—not just as a practical life exercise, but as a way of putting beauty and meaning into their lives.
There are countless ways to weave a food program into the curriculum at every level of education. The creation of the Slow Food University in Pollenzo, Italy, which will open next fall, clearly shows the seriousness and wide reach of an eco-gastronomic perspective. It is reconfiguring gastronomy as a subject of academic inquiry. The depth and breadth of the subject—its relevance in ecology, anthropology, history, physiology, and art—assures it could easily be integrated into academic studies of every school, from the kindergarten to the university.
Now if every school had a lunch program that served its students only local products that had been sustainably farmed, imagine what it would mean for agriculture. Today, twenty percent of the population of the United States is in school. If all these students were eating lunch together, consuming local, organic food, agriculture would change overnight to meet the demand. Our domestic food culture would change as well, as people again grew up learning how to cook affordable, wholesome, and delicious food.
To make this a reality we need more model programs at all levels; when these models are good enough, we will have the momentum to seek the mandate and the money to make them a reality throughout the country. We know from experience that it can be done.
Forty years ago, a presidential commission in America told us our children were physically unfit and that we had to launch a national physical fitness program. The country responded by building gymnasiums, buying equipment and training new physical education teachers, and by making physical education a required part of the curriculum in every school. Today we are worried anew over the health of our children. Child obesity is shocking, and at the present rate of increase, one out of every three children can be expected to develop diabetes, and for African American children, the statistic is one out of every two. We must respond by bringing real food, nutritious food, back into the schools and into the curriculum. We must create new incentives for educators to integrate real food into the lives of their students. Perhaps the best and most radical way to do this is to give credit for school lunch, just as credit is given for physical education or for math or science. This would add a new dimension of integrity to the lunchroom, placing it on a par with the classroom, and breathing new life and dignity into learning how to eat.
What we are calling for is a revolution in public education—a real Delicious Revolution. When the hearts and minds of our children are captured by a school lunch curriculum, enriched with experience in the garden, sustainability will become the lens through which they see the world.
the edible schoolyard
The mission of the Edible Schoolyard is to create and sustain an organic garden and landscape which is wholly integrated into the school's curriculum and lunch program. It involves the student in all aspects of farming the garden - along with preparing, serving and eating the food - as a means of awakening their senses and encouraging awareness and appreciation of the transformative values of nourishment, community, and stewardship of the land.
Principles
The following principles guide the design and conception of the Edible Schoolyard:
Participatory: The Executive Committee, Steering Committee, staff, teachers and students who help plan, develop, and manage the garden reflect the multicultural and demographic diversity of the school and community.
Ecological: The Garden is designed and maintained using sound ecological proctices that are reflected in all aspects of the project, from the way the food is grown, harvested and prepared, to the recycling of waste back into the earth.
Aesthetic: The goal is to create a beautiful environment that will inspire personal and social responsibility, one that will also function as a model for other schools.
Principles
The following principles guide the design and conception of the Edible Schoolyard:
Participatory: The Executive Committee, Steering Committee, staff, teachers and students who help plan, develop, and manage the garden reflect the multicultural and demographic diversity of the school and community.
Ecological: The Garden is designed and maintained using sound ecological proctices that are reflected in all aspects of the project, from the way the food is grown, harvested and prepared, to the recycling of waste back into the earth.
Aesthetic: The goal is to create a beautiful environment that will inspire personal and social responsibility, one that will also function as a model for other schools.
a single carrot
The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.
Paul Cezanne
Friday, 23 January 2009
futures through design - some examples
Here are a few pictures of designs and ideas that are showing us ways that the ecoculture is going. Welcome to the future!
creating - sustainable - communities
Let's begin with the title.
Creating sustainable communities says a good deal about the intention behind this book.
This is a book that anticipates that to achieve something that is sustainable there is a need to attend to both the relationships between the custodians, and a need to engage and nourish the imagination.
Community plays an important part therefore in establishing a tone for participation through the quality of relationships, the extent to which people feel that they have a voice and are capable of action as engaged citizens. This serves to define both the emancipatory possibility of community as a social movement, and ensures that there are fundamental principles of equity, social justice and most significantly ecological consciousness at the heart of the community venture.
Creativity is the dynamic that engages individuals and groups. It is a way of being that stimulates, inspires, designs, imagines and models our world.
Sustainable retreat, is the progression from a managed to a living systems understanding of reality. It is the fundamental framework within which we live our lives in collaboration with all other living beings on the planet.
Creating sustainable communities says a good deal about the intention behind this book.
This is a book that anticipates that to achieve something that is sustainable there is a need to attend to both the relationships between the custodians, and a need to engage and nourish the imagination.
Community plays an important part therefore in establishing a tone for participation through the quality of relationships, the extent to which people feel that they have a voice and are capable of action as engaged citizens. This serves to define both the emancipatory possibility of community as a social movement, and ensures that there are fundamental principles of equity, social justice and most significantly ecological consciousness at the heart of the community venture.
Creativity is the dynamic that engages individuals and groups. It is a way of being that stimulates, inspires, designs, imagines and models our world.
Sustainable retreat, is the progression from a managed to a living systems understanding of reality. It is the fundamental framework within which we live our lives in collaboration with all other living beings on the planet.
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